Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.
Our hearts where they rocked our cradle, Our love where we spent our toil, And our faith, and our hope, and our honor, We pledge to our native soil. God gave all men all earth to love, But since our hearts are small, Ordained for each one spot should prove Beloved over all.
The greatest contribution we can make to the wellbeing of those in our lives is to have peace in our own hearts. When our hearts are filled with gratitude and our minds are brimming with enthusiasm, everyone we encounter leaves our space feeling a little bit lighter than when they entered it.
A mind virus is different in that there is no form to it; these are ideas placed in our heads when we are little. We get programmed by well-meaning people like our parents and their parents, our culture, religions and schools. We get conditioned to believe in our limitations and what's not possible.
What would happen to a body that was starved, suffocated and then forced to drink poison? It would first suffer and then die an agonizing death. We willingly starve and suffocate our hearts by turning away form the remembrance of God. And then we poison our hearts through the bad company we keep, the garbage that goes into our eyes and ears, and emanates from our tongue...
And then we wonder why our heart feels dead.
What we hold in our heads - our memory, our feelings, our thoughts, our sense of our own history - is the sum of our humanity.
Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.
All great movements, it is written, go through three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption. It is the realisation of this third stage, adoption, that requires our passion and our discipline, our hearts and our heads. The fate of animals is in our hands.
The things that inform student culture are created and controlled by the unseen culture, the sociological aspects of our climbing culture, our 'me' generation, our yuppie culture, our SUVs, or, you know, shopping culture, our war culture.
Without reason, why bother? Existence needs purpose: to be able to endure the pain of life with dignity; to give us a reason to continue. The meaning must enter our hearts, not our heads. We must understand the meaning of our suffering
It is our solemn duty, our precious privilege-even our sacred opportunity-to welcome to our homes and to our hearts the children who grace our lives.
If our hearts are ready for anything, we can open to our inevitable losses, and to the depths of our sorrow. We can grieve our lost loves, our lost youth, our lost health, our lost capacities. This is part of our humanness, part of the expression of our love for life.
It is only in God that we discover our origin, our identity, our meaning, our purpose, our significance, and our destiny. Every other path leads to a dead end.
The blue light emanating from our cell phones, our tablets and our laptops is playing havoc on our brain chemicals: our serotonin, our melatonin. It's screwing up our sleep patterns, our happiness, our appetites, our carbohydrate cravings.
Dullness is more than a religious issue, it is a cultural issue. Our entire culture has become dull. Dullness is the absence of the light of our souls. Look around. We have lost the sparkle in our eyes, the passion in our marriages, the meaning in our work, the joy of our faith.
If our eloquence be directed above the heads of our hearers, we shall do no execution. By pointing our arguments low, we stand a chance of hitting their hearts as well as their heads. In addressing angels, we could hardly raise our eloquence too high; but we must remember that men are not angels.