When you take off the mask to yourself you reveal yourself to yourself, and offer the most intimate part of your being to another.


If you go around hiding yourself to another you are engaging in deceit. Are you doing that?


When you truly desire to promote the happiness and welfare of another you have proven your love of yourself, of God, and of the other.


Does your giving reflect a pure heart, or does it represent a means to another end?


Once we have been hurt by the one we love, we have a natural tendency to want guarantees that we will not be hurt again. If one is unwilling to give such a guarantee he does not know himself well, and has made no commitment to the relationship.


A true lover must be willing to suffer for the other’s sake.


A mature person must opt for a particular orientation in life. That is, he must decide to either be open or closed to particular experiences. But, he must make the decision before the experience occurs. If he waits until it is presented it is usually too late.


These sayings to the mature person will be agreeable, even redundant. But to the immature they will either provoke deeper pondering or they will elicit offense and disagreement. Most, however, will not even be aware they exist.


Isn’t it amazing how many people prefer to be ignorant?


There are two kinds of obedience. There is blind obedience in which one obeys for the sake of obedience. The other kind listens to the self, and determines what kind of self one is, and if it is determined to be lacking, embarks on a goal to obtain that which is lacking. True obedience is liberating – it makes one more sensitive in differentiating between truth and error.


When you listen do you hear only what you want to hear and ignore the other? Learn to discriminate, not opinionate!


When you surrender yourself make sure you know what you’re surrendering. It’s better to find out before than after!


Does your main motivation come from within or from extraneous forces?


What impinges upon you, what attracts you, what provokes you, in and of itself is not what is important! What is important is how you respond.


Have you learned the difference between being dependent and interdependent?


We all have freedom of choice, but most people do not understand either that they have it or what it means. What it means is that you have the freedom to choose who you will be. Making the choice however, does not mean making the effort. But it is the first step. Now you have to make a choice to take the second step.


There is another inexorable law of life that we all are required to face. It is the law that says there is an opposition in all things. Are you prepared to recognize the opposition when it comes, or do you just wait until after it comes and has left its damage?


You have all heard the aphorism, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” It means that it is better to prevent hurt rather than deal with it after it occurs.


If you want to get through life without stepping on egg shells and examining every possibility and analyzing every motivation, make it easy on yourself by going through the difficulty of changing yourself.