The Road Less Traveled

Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.

I define love thus: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.

There are four: delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing.

The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action.

Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems. Without discipline we can solve nothing.

Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom.

The feeling of being valuable—'I am a valuable person'—is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline.

Self-discipline is self-caring.

We cannot solve a problem by saying 'It’s not my problem.' We cannot solve a problem by hoping that someone else will solve it for us.

Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity.

The pain of giving up is the pain of death, but death of the old is birth of the new.

Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action.

The more clearly we see the reality of the world, the better equipped we are to deal with the world.

Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.

True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision.

The essential ingredient of successful deep and meaningful psychotherapy is love.

The symptoms and the illness are not the same thing. The illness exists long before the symptoms. Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cure.

Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.