I believe we live in a love-starved society. Everywhere you go there are probably people who haven’t had the right kind of love in their lives.

I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.

We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one’s striving.

Catering to bad feelings feeds and empowers them.

I’m tender on the inside.

One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.

Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

I’m a people’s man – only the people matter.

The love we give away is the only love we keep.

Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.

One of the things I did when I discovered this huge importance of being vulnerable is very happily moved away from the shame research, because that’s such a downer, and people hate that topic. It’s not that vulnerability is the upside, but it’s better than shame, I guess.

Fashion is that thing that saved me from being sad.

We don’t laugh because we’re happy – we’re happy because we laugh.

If it’s stress of things that we cannot control, what you have to do is you mitigate that stress as much as possible. You’ve planned, you’ve trained, you’ve done everything you can in your power to mitigate the stress that’s facing you. And then after that, there’s nothing you can do. So, you have to let that one go.

If someone decides they’re not going to be happy, it’s not your problem. You don’t have to spend your time and energy trying to cheer up someone who has already decided to stay in a bad mood. Believe it or not, you can actually hurt people by playing into their self-pity.

I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.

Do not give in too much to feelings. A overly sensitive heart is an unhappy possession on this shaky earth.

We don’t get to know people when they come to us; we must go to them to find out what they are like.

Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.

We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.

It would be my guess that Madonna is not a very happy woman. From my own experience, having gone through persona changes like that, that kind of clawing need to be the center of attention is not a pleasant place to be.

You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them.

I go through a lot of depression, and I know other people do, too, but I have an outlet that so many people don’t. If you have that inside of you and can’t get it out, what do you do?

Exceptionally hard decisions can deplete your energy to the point at which you finally cave in. If you mentally crumble and degenerate into negative thinking, you’ll magnify the problem to the point where it can haunt you.

When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn’t know it had a name.

No matter what message you are about to deliver somewhere, whether it is holding out a hand of friendship, or making clear that you disapprove of something, is the fact that the person sitting across the table is a human being, so the goal is to always establish common ground.

No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.

I wake up in the morning and my heart is light, man. It’s not heavy. I don’t have skeletons in the closet on their way out.

I’ve realized that being happy is a choice. You never want to rub anybody the wrong way or not be fun to be around, but you have to be happy. When I get logical and I don’t trust my instincts – Thats when I get in trouble.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

One of the things I’ve never been accused of is not caring about people.

We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.

When we’re looking for compassion, we need someone who is deeply rooted, is able to bend and, most of all, embraces us for our strengths and struggles.

There is such a thing as old emotional pain living inside you. It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain.

I am not a victim of emotional conflicts. I am human.

When your soul is resting, your emotions are okay, your mind is okay, and your will is at peace with God, not resisting what He’s doing.

Dread, which is closely related to fear, steals the ability to enjoy ordinary life and makes people anxious about the future. It keeps them from looking forward to the next day, the next month, or the next decade.

A lot of times, people feel that if they forgive the person who hurt them, then they will continue to take advantage of them or not take responsibility for what they did wrong.

It’s so much easier to like people, and to let people in, to trust them until they prove that you should do otherwise. The alternative is being an iceberg.

I feel like if you’re a really good human being, you can try to find something beautiful in every single person, no matter what.

Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit.

Do I worry about being in the public eye and raising kids? Yeah. Any situation you’re in, you’re gonna worry about raising kids. But it’s champagne problems, too. There are people who can’t feed their kids.

The thing that will never go away is that connection you make with a band or a song where you’re moved by the fact that it’s real people making music. You make that human connection with a song like ‚Let It Be‘ or ‚Long and Winding Road‘ or a song like ‚Bohemian Rhapsody‘ or ‚Roxanne,‘ any of those songs. They sound like people making music.

Ethiopia didn’t just blow my mind; it opened my mind. Anyway, on our last day at this orphanage a man handed me his baby and said, ‚Would you take my son with you?‘ He knew, in Ireland, that his son would live, and that in Ethiopia, his son would die.

A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance.

Babylon is everywhere. You have wrong and you have right. Wrong is what we call Babylon, wrong things. That is what Babylon is to me. I could have born in England, I could have born in America, it make no difference where me born, because there is Babylon everywhere.

Meditation can help us embrace our worries, our fear, our anger; and that is very healing. We let our own natural capacity of healing do the work.

Nobody looks like they did when they were 20, so why not take advantage of the fact that you’re changing, emotionally as well as physically?

With increasing age, dullness of mind and heart sets in.

No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation.

Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America’s really large shadow and that’s not all that bad.

A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.

I’m always attracted to people who interest me. They’ve got to be people who are really true to themselves somehow, and who are always trying to do something that makes their life more interesting, or better, or something for somebody else. They’re interested in people.

What is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What’s the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.

Some days I totally appreciate everything that’s happening to me, and some days I feel everyone’s waiting for me to mess up.

There is plenty of building material and more than enough manpower to make a decent home for every Cuban. But if we continue to wait for the golden calf, a thousand years will have gone by, and the problem will remain the same.

Even the securest financial plan and the finest health coverage aren’t enough to hold us steady when the challenges come… We need something more, something deeper and unshakeable, something that will see us through life’s hard times.