1. “You make each day a special day. You know how—by just your being you.”
2. “A love of learning has a lot to do with learning that we are loved.”
3. “Some days, doing the best we can may still fall short of what we would like to be able to do, but life isn’t perfect on any front—and doing what we can with what we have is the most we should expect of ourselves or anyone else.”
4. “There is no normal life that is free of pain. It’s the very wrestling with our problems that can be the impetus for our growth.”
5. “We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say, ‘It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.’ Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.”
6. “Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.”
7. “The thing I remember best about successful people I’ve met all through the years is their obvious delight in what they’re doing and it seems to have very little to do with worldly success. They just love what they’re doing, and they love it in front of others.”
8. “When we can talk about , they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.”
9. “There are three ways to ultimate success—the first way is to be kind; the second way is to be kind; the third way is to be kind.”
10. “I like you just the way you are.”
11. “If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of.”
12. “Often, when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else.”
13. “I hope you’re proud of yourself for the times you’ve said ‘yes,’ when all it meant was extra work for you and was seemingly helpful only to someone else.”
14. “Transitions are almost always signs of growth, but they can bring feelings of loss. To get somewhere new, we may have to leave somewhere else behind.”
15. “You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices.”
16. “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
17. “I feel so strongly that deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex.”
18. “As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has, or ever will have—something inside that is unique to all time.”
19. “Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn’t have to be a lonely kind of thing.”
20. “The greatest gift you ever give is your honest self.”
21. “Attitudes are caught, not taught.”
22. “Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me.”
23. “It’s important to know when we need to stop, reflect, and receive. In our competitive world, that might be called a waste of time.”
24. “Honesty is often very hard. The truth is often . But the freedom it can bring is worth the trying.”
25. “Life is deep and simple, and what our society gives us is shallow and complicated.”
26. “The child is in me still and sometimes not so still.”
27. “Silence is so powerful, so important. There is so much to be learned from it.”
28. “Parents don’t come into full bloom at the birth of the first baby. In fact, is about growing. It’s about our own growth as much as it is about our children’s growing and that kind of growing happens little by little.”
29. “How sad it is that we give up on people who are just like us.”
30. “I’m proud of you for the times you came in second, or third, or fourth, but what you did was the best you have ever done.”
31. “Knowing that we can be loved exactly as we are gives us all the best opportunity for growing into the healthiest of people.”
32. “Whether we’re a preschooler or a young teen, a graduating college senior or a retired person, we human beings all want to know that we’re acceptable—that our being alive somehow makes a difference in the lives of others.”
33. “Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past. Hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.”
34. “When I was a boy, I used to think that ‘strong’ meant having big muscles, great physical power; but the longer I live, the more I realize that real strength has much more to do with what is not seen.”
35. “Real strength has to do with helping others.”
36. “We speak with more than our mouths. We listen with more than our ears.”
37. “You know, you don’t have to look like everybody else to be acceptable and to feel acceptable.”
38. “It would have been sad for me to spend my life just trying to superimpose stuff on people rather than trying to encourage them to look within themselves for what’s of value.”
39. “Try your best to make goodness attractive. That’s one of the toughest assignments you’ll ever be given.”
40. “The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is.”
41. “I think that those who would try to make you feel less than who you are, I think that’s the greatest evil.”
42. “In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts, and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.”
43. “People have said, ‘Don’t cry’ to other people for years and years,’ and all it has ever meant is, ‘I’m too uncomfortable when you show your feelings. Don’t cry.’ I’d rather have them say, ‘Go ahead and cry. I’m here to be with you.’”
44. “I think everybody longs to be loved and longs to know that he or she is lovable and, consequently, the greatest thing that we can do is to help somebody know that they are loved and capable of loving.”
45. “I don’t think anyone can grow unless he’s loved exactly as he is now—appreciated for what he is rather than what he will be.”
46. “Listening is where love begins—listening to ourselves and then to our neighbors.”
47. “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor. Would you be mine? Could you be mine?”
48. “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being.”
49. “Mutual caring relationships require kindness and patience, tolerance, optimism, joy in the other’s , confidence in oneself, and the ability to give without undue thought of gain.”
50. “There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.”
51. “The greatest gift that you can give another person is to gracefully receive whatever it is that they want to give us.”
52. “Love isn’t a perfect state of caring.”
53. “We need to help people to discover the true meaning of love.”
54. “Love is generally confused with dependence.”
55. “Those of us who have grown in true love know that we can love only in proportion to our capacity for independence.”
Note: If you’re enjoying these quotes, make sure to read our collection of .
56. “Love is like infinity—you can’t have more or less infinity, and you can’t compare two things to see if they’re equally infinite. Infinity just is; and that’s the way I think love is, too.”
57. “Anyone who has ever been able to sustain good work has had at least one person—and often many—who have believed in him or her. We just don’t get to be competent human beings without a lot of different investments from others.”
58. “We want to raise our children so that they can take a sense of pleasure in both their own heritage and the diversity of others.”
59. “When our children see us expressing our emotions, they can learn that their own feelings are natural and permissible, can be expressed, and can be talked about. That’s an important thing for our children to learn.”
60. “What matters in this life is more than winning for ourselves. What really matters is helping others win too. Even if it means slowing down and changing our course now and then.”
61. “Feeling good about ourselves is essential in our being able to love others.”
62. “We don’t always succeed in what we try, certainly not by the world’s standards, but I think you’ll find it’s the willingness to keep trying that matters most.”
63. “There’s a world of difference between insisting on someone’s doing something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it.”
64. “I recently learned that in an average lifetime, a person walks about sixty-five thousand miles. That’s two and a half times around the world. I wonder where your steps will take you. I wonder how you’ll use the rest of the miles you’re given.”
65. “It always helps to have people we love beside us when we have to do difficult things in life.”
66. “Discovering the truth about ourselves is a lifetime’s work, but it’s worth the effort.”
67. “Anything mentionable is manageable.”
68. “One of the most important things a person can learn to do is to make something out of whatever he or she happens to have at the moment.”
69. “We all have only one life to live on Earth, and through television we have the choice of to demean this life or to cherish it in creative, imaginative ways.”
70. “The best teacher in the world is someone who loves what he or she does, and just loves it in front of you.”
71. “Often, out of periods of losing come the greatest strivings toward a new winning streak.”
72. “How many times have you noticed that it’s the little quiet moments in the midst of life that seem to give the rest extra-special meaning?”
73. “We’re all on a journey—each one of us. And if we can be sensitive to the person who happens to be our neighbor, that, to me, is the greatest challenge as well as the greatest pleasure.”
74. “All life events are formative. All contribute to what we become, year by year, as we go on growing.”
75. “We all have different gifts, so we all have different ways of saying to the world who we are.”
76. “Fame is a four-letter word. And like tape, or zoom, or face, or pain, or love, or life, what ultimately matters is what we do with it.”
77. “Who you are inside is what helps you make and do everything in life.”
78. “Little by little, we human beings are confronted with situations that give us more and more clues that we are not perfect.”
79. “When we’re able to resign ourselves to the wishes that will never come true, there can be enormous energies available within us for whatever we can do.”
80. “I believe that appreciation is a holy thing—that when we look for what’s best in a person we happen to be with at the moment, we’re doing what God does all the time.”
81. “The only thing evil can’t stand is forgiveness.”
82. “Life is for service.”
83. “Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel—a facet of that jewel; and in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal.”
84. “It’s a mistake to think that we have to be lovely to be loved by human beings or by God.”
85. “I believe it’s a fact of life that what we have is less important than what we make out of what we have.”
86. “The world needs a sense of worth, and it will achieve it only by its people feeling that they are worthwhile.”
87. “All I know to do is to light the candle that has been given to me.”
88. “It’s not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It’s the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is good stuff.”
89. “What interests me so much about the characters of the Bible is that they make but God uses them anyway, in important ways.”
90. “Nobody’s perfect, but God can even use our imperfection.”
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91. “The real issue in life is not how many blessings we have, but what we do with our blessings. Some people have many blessings and hoard them. Some have few and give everything away.”
92. “The kingdom of God is for the broken-hearted.”
93. “It’s our insides that make us who we are—that allow us to dream and wonder and feel for others. That’s what’s essential. That’s what will always make the biggest difference in our world.”
94. “Whatever we choose to imagine can be as private as we want it to be. Nobody knows what you’re thinking or feeling unless you share it.”
95. “For a couple with young children, divorce seldom comes as a solution to stress, only as a way to end one form of pain and accept another.”
96. “The real drama of life is never centerstage. It’s always in the wings.”
97. “Love and trust, in the space between what’s said and what’s heard in our life, can make all the difference in the world.”
98. “You write of ‘powerlessness.’ Join the club, we are not in control. God is.”