"The inartistic methods that we use to blunt anxiety and unartful expedients that we resort to in order to escape pain and numb banality reveals what we dread most, the act of suffering from a mortal loss or the debasement that we earn by wallowing in our decadent acts of escapism."

"We are each authors of a self-concocted depiction establishing our present day identity. Our persona is woven from a range of truths interweaved with inspired imagination and occasionally bounded by convenient falsehoods. Creating our personal story generates an identity myth that allows us to carry on."

"The only manner to blunt in a wholesome and righteous manner the emotional trauma of living under a death sentence is by making every day count, living passionately, and dedicating the journey stumbling through time to accomplishing a master life plan. We can assist each other find meaning in life and undertake a path that make every person's life a worthy endeavor, but each person bears the personal responsibility for living their life, establishing who they are, and behaving in a manner that provides credence to their self-imposed ideology. If a person persists in shifting personal responsibility for their way of life onto someone else, they he or she fails to discover the meaning of his own existence."

"Condemning war has not curbed armed conflict. Religion and education did not eliminate war. Warfare did not terminate more wars. Armed combat simply breeds endless wars."

"The psyche of some people, whether through innate structure or via adaption to personal experiences, is uniquely adept for absolute aloneness."

"Literature provides a person with a conceptual framework for recognizing human beings recurrent challenges in life. Reading good literature deepens a person's understanding of the variable ways that somebody might respond to circumstances in their world, thereby adding to their own potential intellectual and spiritual depth and expands their understanding of the nuances of their own personal behavior."

"A person tied to the world of sorrows can return to nature for inspiration. Nature provides solace to troubled hearts."

"We develop our whole character from our thoughts, actions, attentive observations, and from the resolute pursuit of our inspirational dreams."

"A program of active reading and writing might be the hardest form of thinking, but it is also the most organized methodology of self-education. Reading exposes the mind to a world of ideas heretofore unimaginable and encourages the novice learner to write. Reading is a form a joint mediation and writing represents the product of several authors' collective and collaborative minds at work."

"Civilization could not exist without tremors of desire and without the counteracting, negation force of disciplined denial. Nor would the gyratory pulsations of a lively civilization exist devoid of the convulsive chemistry of union and repellency. We are born with a desire to be immortal. Cursed with the knowledge that we must die, people live their orthodox lives out by displaying reckless abandon as to the outcome of human life or nervously hounded by utter despondency nipping their heels. How we resolve this decidedly human complex of carrying out our daily lives while burden by our inescapable mortality determines our essential character. The collation of similar values adopted by our community determines who we are as a people."

"Laughing and crying are closely related. Smiling and grimacing both involve a person showing their teeth as does laughing and growling. Crying and laughing always represents the expression of actual emotion."

"The tedium of existence and feeling imprisoned in a deplorable job can cause a person to consider the most expedient escape route from suffering including flirting with suicide. Fernando Pessoa wrote in "The Book of Disquiet of his own feelings of uneasiness and sense of discouragement. "I suffer from life and from other people. I cannot look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten, and lost, with no connection to anything useful or real " only then do I find myself comforted."

"Sex and love represent one of the numerous absurdities and hopeless incongruences demarking human nature. A person whom only seeks out sex and eschews love will live a barren existence. Sex without love is a brute display of physical reproductive capacity. Sex is not a worthless or stupid activity when it forms a cog in a loving and affectionate relationship. Sex and love might not make the world go round, but when joined they make it a better place to live in."

"A living philosophy entails a conscious act of awareness. Without a living philosophy to guide and support us, we are not living as receptive, thinking, and emotionally responsive human beings; we are merely surviving as people."

"The goal of any spiritual person is to strive towards attaining self-realization by living spontaneously in the present moment of physical reality, free from anxiety and distress, unencumbered by frivolous affections, and liberated from specious attachments."

"All roads taken lead us only to ourselves."

"We employ education and the convictions gained through the intermeshing of personal experiences and fresh ideas to establish the configuration of our being that in actuality was our mysterious potentiality from the very inception of our birth."

"Writing is one means to investigate the mystique of life. Each fresh page is an unsullied canvas that an inquisitive writer employs to explore the poetic transience behind their existence."

"A principled person's greatest disappointment will always be his or her own failures to respond to setbacks in a dynamic and positive way."

"A series of disconcerting questions nibbles at hearts of troubled youths. These same unanswered questions, along with their acerbic toxins, reveal their pungent fumes more frequently and with greater intensity as a person rushes headfirst into life's concrete jungle."

"In lieu of fixating upon details of our life which can lead to sadness or madness, we achieve an enhanced perspective regarding the perplexity haunting our being by thinking abstractedly, a process that allows us to discern the essential principles of life."

"Extreme anxiety, fear, exhaustion, and lack of other viable options are what cause a person to surrender everything. Desperation is also the raw material of drastic change. Crisis spurs critical, dramatic shifts in a person's psyche. Only a person who is willing to lose everything will transform himself or herself. Only by moving outside our comfort zone of the past " letting go of a former being " will a person expand their state of conscious awareness. Now that I am desperate, I am dangerous. I am also ripe for transformation."

"Our most potent memories include the taste and smells of foods we enjoyed as a child in part because it reminds us of who fed us a meal."

"Doubt is the stock in trade all philosophers as well as all scientific persons. Conversely, certainty is the cane that all religious fanatics and other zealots wield with outrageous righteousness. Only by allowing for doubt can we probe our ignorance. Doubt, therefore, is the essential seed of thought."

"Every person struggles with the self to find and kindle their special radiance, which comes from cultivating kindness, charity, and love."

"Understanding of oneself is the first act in establishing a transformative philosophy for living a vivid and a reflective existence. Knowing thy self is essential to designing and instigating a meaningful life that is self-directed instead of exclusively controlled by innate traits and external determinates."

"Nature blessed every person with the innate capacity to express wonder and awe for the eternal world and act with a kind and unstinting soul."

"An artistic person taps into the destructive emotional energy of guilt and shame and the longing to love and be loveable and transforms these powerful emotions into a creative force."

"Thinking is a personalized activity that can lead us into a state of happiness or cause us to be sad. Who we are becomes a product of how we think. What we think about and how we integrate knowledge into a comprehensive schema regulates our evolving self-identity. The precision of the human mind and the interplay between cognitive thinking and reactive emotions plays a central role in self-identity."

"Reality does not create the entire womb of human life. We have eyes that witness truth and beauty. We are creatures that think, plan, dream, and remember. The lambent luminescence supplied by human memory reveals that we live in a dream world. Human imagination tied to memory tells us how to live today and forevermore."

"All revered spiritual leaders, political leaders, and diplomats, captains of industry, intellectuals, and winning generals exhibit genuine humility that empowers them to act with integrity and courage under the most distressing circumstances."

"Patriotism is the surefire wingnut that binds our diverse society. Rulers historically used patriotism to manipulate the populous. Patriotism serves as the trump card to justify going to war and mandatory inscription of young men into military service. Patriotism is becoming synonyms with state justified coercion and murder of less powerful people."

"A person's industrious and creative mindset can overcome great obstacles that besiege their existence. Humankind's greatest unraveling is our propensity to panic when confronting the pealing silence of nothingness."

"Writing allows a person to explore both physical reality and the internal workings of their mind. Writing places us in touch with our unconsciousness. Writing purposefully, applying the white heat of self-examination, can act to transform oneself. Writing allows a person with sufficient resolve to anneal their basic constitution, make their mind more flexible."

"A person who cultivates any interest in self-improvement will necessary encounter successes and failures, both of which life lessons can be useful to remember when seeking distant mileposts. Failure stimulates evaluation and new learning. Success stimulates development and retention of good habits."

"A person can transfigure the disquiet of solitude in a positive or negative manner. Periods of enforced solitude can cause a person to develop eccentricities of conduct and character, parley with a number of mental aberrations, partake in self-destructive diversions, or use their time productively to contemplate worldly issues and diligently work on self-improvement."

"Human life is inherently dualistic. It consists of or is explicable as two fundamental entities, including rivalries between subject and object, mind and matter, and conflict between the benevolent and the malevolent forces. Opposition in the universe creates a dynamic living universe composed of good and evil, body and soul. Human thoughts and feelings are the communal products of the conscious and unconscious mind's interpretation of a constant flow of coded and symbolic dialogue."

"We can only hope to live a meaningful life by serving as earnest witnesses to life's tragic beauty."

"Hard edges make truth and by necessity, truth is unbending. Unlike truth's absolutism, justice is a qualitative substance; it is not an absolute tenet. Justice must be pliable in order to meet the needs of more than one person or one group. Justice goes against separation; it is a form of human superglue. Justice is what binds us as people. No human is capable of measuring out or dispensing unqualified justice. Justice naturally seeks conciliation and demands compromise."

"Many aspects of the human condition are beautiful and many others are vile. Betrayal and personal agony represent a maddening part of being human. A person can maintain personal dignity by exercising restraint, remaining true to their conscience, and preserving under difficult conditions."

"Listening to music, reading literature, writing, and extended periods of personal introspection provide four prongs of the incitements available to form a conscious and subconscious designation of self. Other potential incentives that contribute to self-identity include religion and cultural events as well as painting, sculpture, dance, films, newspapers, television, Internet surfing, web sites, and online message boards."

"Childhood introduces children to the wounds of the world."

"A person's irregular surfaces are what make us interesting."

"Storytelling is an ancient art. The lucent vibes of stories express what we cannot articulate directly. When we hear someone's story, we respond to the spark of humanness within ourselves that seeks to come out in the light and greet the world. When we tell the stories of our lives, we give voice to people bereft of speech, we make the persons whom we love or loved immortal, and we pass along our familiarity with the natural and physical world."

"There may not be an emotion more complex than the dual stations of pride. The positive connation of pride " the telluric current resulting from both natural causes and interactions of human beings " flows from the conception of applying a person's best effort to accomplish worthwhile tasks. The negative connotation of pride refers to an inflated sense of one's personal status or accomplishments."

"Suffering is an essential component of life. No person escapes suffering, which is indivisible from life itself. Suffering is what places in in contact with the self; it is what allows us to understand the spiritual nature behind our existence."

"A dreamer rises above their inherent fearfulness that they will always produce inferior work and grants oneself a license to put forth their best effort."

"The closet bond that we share with our brethren is that of grief. Every community knows sorrow."

"All throughout our lives, we selectively draw on selected shavings of life events and reflect upon them through consciousness, creating an arranged catalogue of senses, faculties, and mental activities that compose our personal life story."

"Writing the story of their own life allows the author to parse their story into examinable segments while continuing to engage in the act of communion and creation."