Ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Stephen Goforth
The seven social sins: politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice. -Mahatma Gandhi
Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems. We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within. More often than not we don't want to know ourselves, don't want to depend on ourselves, don't want to live with ourselves. By middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.
John Gardner, Self-Renewal
You cannot reason someone out of something he or she was not reasoned into. -Jonathan Swift (Born Nov. 30, 1667)
(CS Lewis was born Nov. 29, 1898)
Love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god; which of course can be re-stated in the form ‘begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god.’ This balance seems to me an indispensable safeguard. If we ignore it, the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God.
Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority. Its voice tends to sound as if it were the will of God himself. It tells us not to count the cost, it demands of us a total commitment, it attempts to over-ride all other claims and insinuates that any action which is sincerely done “for love’s sake” is thereby lawful and even meritorious.
CS Lewis, The Four Loves
The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth. -Former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov
Sometimes a nation abolishes God, but fortunately, God is more tolerant.
Most patients take too much responsibility for the wrong things, and not enough responsibility for those things about which they can do something. Furthermore, on the positive side, the naming (of their condition) helps the patient feel allied with a vast movement which is "science"; and, also, he is not isolated any more since all kinds of other people have the same problem that he has. The naming assures him that he therapist has an interest in him and is willing to act as his guide through purgatory. Naming the problem is tantamount to the therapist's saying, "Your problem can be known, it has causes; you can stand outside and look at it."
But the greatest danger in the therapeutic process lies right here: that the naming for the patient will be used not as a aid for change, but as a substitute for it. He may stand off and get a temporary security by diagnosis, labels, talking about symptoms, and then be relieved of the necessity of using will in action and in loving. This plays into the hands of modern man's central defense, namely intellectualizing- using words as substitutes for feelings and experience. The word skates always on the edge of the danger of covering up the daimonic as well as disclosing it.
Rollo May, Love & Will
When there’s a muddled message, you don’t err on the side of safety. You err on the side of desire. -Maria Konnikova, quoted in The Atlantic
The self-renewing person is highly motivated. The walls that hem us in as we grow older forms channels of least resistance. If we stay in the channels, all is easy. To get out requires some extra drive, enthusiasm or energy.
Everyone has noted the abundant resources of energy that seem available to those who enjoy what they are doing or find meaning in what they are doing. Self-renewing people know that if they have no great conviction about what they are doing they had better find something that they can have great conviction about. All of us cannot spend all of our time pursuing or deepest convictions. But all of us, either in our careers or as part-time activities, should be doing something about which we care deeply.
John Gardner, Self-Renewal
It is never too late to be what you might have been. -George Eliot (born Nov. 22, 1819)
Reframe the other side’s accusations as opportunities to talk about problems.
If (my wife) 'is not,' then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren't, and never were, any people. Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there. What we call the living are simply those who have not yet been unmasked. All equally bankrupt, but some not yet declared. But this must be nonsense; vacuity revealed to whom? Bankruptcy declared to whom? To other boxes of fireworks or clouds of atoms. I will never believe — more strictly I can't believe — that one set of physical events could be, or make, a mistake about other sets.
CS Lewis, A Grief Observed
Reason is not omni-competent.
Certain kinds of verbal praise can be detrimental to learning. Young children who constantly hear “person” praise (“you’re so smart to do this well”) as opposed to “task” praise (“you did that well”) are more likely to believe that intelligence is fixed rather than expandable with hard work. When they subsequently face setbacks after receiving person praise, their views of intelligence can cause them to develop a sense of helplessness (“I’m not as smart as I once thought I was”).
When researchers asked these children to describe what made them feel smart, they talked about tasks they found easy, that required little effort, and they could do before anyone else without making mistakes. In contrast, their peers who they thought they got smarter by trying harder and learning new things said they felt intelligent when they didn’t understand something, tried really hard, and then go it, or figured out something new.
In other words, the children with the fixed view of intelligence and a sense of helplessness felt smart only when they avoided those activities most likely to help them learn – struggling, grappling, and making mistakes.
These children are likely to have “performance goals”. They want to achieve perfection or get the “right” answer to impress other people because they want to appear to be one of the “smart people”. They are afraid of making mistakes. They will often carefully calculate how much they need to achieve to win the proper praise and do no more than that, for fear that they might fail in the eyes of others. Some of these people do excel by some standards, but they still achieve primarily for the sake of that external recognition and fall short of where they might go.
In contrast, students who believe that they can become more intelligent by learning (a “mastery orientation’) often work essentially to increase their own competence (adopting “learning goals”), not to win rewards. They are more likely to take risks in learning, to try harder tasks, and consequently learn more than children who are performance-oriented.
Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do
It is when we are in transition that we are most completely alive. I have often asked groups of individuals that I am working with to introduce themselves, one to another, referring only to those things that are not changing in their lives.
The results is a soft murmur of voices talking about where they live and how many children they have and what kind of work they do. After everyone has had a few minutes of that, I ask them to reintroduce themselves to each other, speaking this time only of the things that are changing in their lives.
There is usually a moment of nervous laughter, then a little pause, then there is a wave of talk about the gains and losses that they are experiencing. Before a minute has passed, voices are rising and falling. Intonations are full of energy. There is laughter. Hands are moving in gesture.
Without fail, the second introduction is far more alive than the first—even though it is by what is not changing in our lives that we customarily define ourselves or are defined by the academics who want to describe us in terms of the categories we fall into.
If you asked the people who had done the two introductions, most of them would say that they are tied of things changing all the time and that they wish that their lives would settle down. Yet it is when they talk about all the changes that they are most animated and energized.
Actually, it is not the fact of being in transition that most people mind, but rather that they cannot place their experience of being in transition within any larger, meaningful context.
William Bridges, The Way of Transitions
Worry can literally paralyze us, sapping our energy and strength. People who worry are not merely concerned about their present and future circumstances; they have a mental agenda of the way things must occur. The worrier’s mind is so captivated by what ought or ought not to be, that he can only respond with duress and despair when situations displease him.
Les Carter, Imperative People: Those Who Must Be in Control
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
A poor self-image is not to be equated with humility or the mark of a servant. -Charles Swindoll
Becoming is a service of Goforth Solutions, LLC / Copyright ©2026 All Rights Reserved