Creativity flourishes when we have a sense of safety and self-acceptance.

Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free.

We may tell ourselves that love is not really available. but the deeper truth is that we don't entirely trust it, and therefore have a hard time fully opening to it or letting it all the way into us. This disconnects us from our own heart, exacerbating our sense of love's scarcity.

Writing, like jewelry design, is a series of choices that lead to a sense of something made — that something is "sense." Sense brings to the writer choice and, with choice, a sense of at least the potential for happiness.

I think people have a vague sense that the television system is changing.

Many recovering creatives sabotage themselves most frequently by making nice. There is tremendous cost to such erastz virtue. Many of us have a virtue out of deprivation. We have embraced a long-suffering artistic anorexia as a martyr's cross . We have used it to feed a false sense of spirituality grounded in being good, meaning superior. Spirituality has often been misused as a route to an unloving solitude, a stance where we proclaim ourselves above our human nature. This spiritual superiority is really only one more form of denial. For an artist, virture can be deadly. The urge toward respectability and maturity can be stulifying, even fatal.

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.

For those of us working to increase our creativity, it is always good to be out and about, especially on our feet. Walking, the simplest of tools, is among the most profound. It makes us larger than we are. When we walk, we wake up our consciousness. We enliven our senses. We arrive at a sense of well-being. We experience "conscious contact" with a power greater than ourselves. That still, small voice is automatically amplified a footfall at a time. "Solvitur ambulando," St. Augustine of Hippo is said to have remarked. "It is solved by walking."

Never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

There are many things you do very well. It pays to remind yourself often of how skillful and successful you’ve already been. No, you don’t want to adopt an attitude of arrogance or superiority, because that doesn’t do anyone any good. What’s important, though, is that you foster a strong and growing sense of authentic confidence in your abilities.

Everything you do well, you’ve learned how to do and you’ve learned how to improve. The powerful thing is, there is no limit to the new and valuable things you can learn. Though you may not be celebrated as a success in the world’s eye, you are indeed absolutely successful in your own unique ways. Each day, each challenge, each experience, each encounter has made you more knowledgeable, more capable, and more effective.

You already have accumulated all sorts of useful skills. And one of the most powerful skills you have is the ability to learn and to perfect even more skills. Consider your skills, make good use of your skills, and grow them into even more skills. Never forget that you are skilled at being skillful, and you can use that skill to successfully follow any purpose that has real meaning for you.

When we write, we "place" ourselves in our world. We say, "This is where I am, right now, and this is how I feel about that." Convrsely, when we focus on the places where we have been, we often connect to a deep and specific sense of how we felt when we were there. In other words, by mapping our literal, physical placements, we are often able to more accurately map our psychological placement. Good writers know this.

Renewing our social/emotional dimension does not take time in the same sense that renewing other dimensions does. We can do it in our normal everyday interactions with other people. But it definitely requires exercise. We may have to push ourselves because may of us have not achieved the level of Private Victory and the skills of Public Victory necessary.

A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.

If we will use writing to connect to ourselves, I believe we can connect across time and space and distance. I believe in the global village we are making, and I believe that in ordcer to make that village truly habitable, we will need to return to that page. We use the expression "I am paging him" when we speak of trying to get someone's attention to some busy intersection — a convention, an international airport, a large manufacturing concern. Our world, our global village, is all of these things, and if we want to get one another's attention, we do need to "page," in a slightly different sense that we need to write.

As artists, we run a risk of staleness if we close ourselves off to fresh experience. Each day must remain an exploratory expedition. We remain tourists on our home terrain. We must hold on to a sense of adventure. To do this, we must keep our curiosity alive and gently feed it. Walking, the world moves toward us at a manageable rate. We are able to take in the new flowers at the greengrocer's, the fresh plantings in a window box. We see our world anew.

Gratitude: A lively sense of future benefit.