spend more time with people who add value to your life and elevate your mood, you’ll begin to adopt their encouraging thinking patterns and reflect their vibrations back at them.

If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers — not all of whom are modern . . . I mean, if you are willing to make allowances for the way English has changed, you can go way, way back with this — becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. So probably the smart thing to say is that lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.

it is only when you have mastered the art of loving yourself that you can truly love others. it's only when you have opened your own heart that you can touch the hearts of others. when you feel centered and alive, you are in much better position to be a better person.

Close friends are truly life's treasures. Sometimes they know us better than we know ourselves. With gentle honesty, they are there to guide and support us, to share our laughter and our tears. Their presence reminds us that we are never really alone.

Goodwill is not enough; we need to learn the art of making others happy. Art is the essence of life, and the substance of art is mindfulness.

When you love something like reading — or drawing or music or nature — it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great.

Well, life isn't cheap. It's the greatest mystery of any millennium, and television needs to do all it can to broadcast that...to show and tell what the good in life is all about.

But how do we make goodness attractive? By doing whatever we can do to bring courage to those whose lives move near our own — by treating our 'neighbor' at least as well as we treat ourselves and allowing that to inform everything that we produce.

Who in your life has been such a servant to you? Who has helped you love the good that grows within you? Let's just take ten seconds to think of some of those people who have loved us and wanted what was best for us in life, those who have encouraged us to become who we are tonight - just ten seconds of silence.

No matter where they are, either here or in heaven, imagine how pleased those people must be to know that you thought of them right now.

Make friendship a fine art.

If you inherently long for something, become it first. If you want gardens, become the gardener. If you want love, embody love. If you want mental stimulation, change the conversation. If you want peace, exude calmness. If you want to fill your world with artists, begin to paint. If you want to be valued, respect your own time. If you want to live ecstatically, find the ecstasy within yourself. This is how to draw it in, day by day, inch by inch.

It is the richness of a personality, the fullness of it, its power to flow over and to bestow, its instinctive feeling of ease, and its affirmative attitude towards itself, that creates great love and great sacrifices: these passions proceed from strong and godlike personalism as surely as do the desire to be master, to obtrude, and the inner certainty that one has a right to everything.

The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.

Art feeds my soul. Great books battleproof my hope. Rich conversations magnify my creativity. Wonderful music uplifts my heart. Beautiful sights fortify my spirit.

What we love in others we not only awaken in others, but we develop those very things more or less in ourselves.

It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.