I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate - it's apathy. It's not giving a damn.

Facing our grief is essential to combatting and overcoming our despair and powerlessness. The elders taught her that grief is not something to avoid or to be afraid of. And that if we come together and share our sadness, it can be healing." "I absolutely agree," Jane said. "It's really important for us to confront our grief and get over our feelings of helplessness and hopelessness—our very survival

Ya hurt, Joshsh?" I thought that was quite apparent, but for someone like Sam who spent a good deal of his time on the ground, perhaps it was a reasonable question.

If someone decides they're not going to be happy, it's not your problem. You don't have to spend your time and energy trying to cheer up someone who has already decided to stay in a bad mood. Believe it or not, you can actually hurt people by playing into their self-pity.

Yet we are most true to our identity and calling when we live in the midst of broken people.

Do you think that I would not have let you know that, if you suffered, I was suffering too: that if you wept there were tears in my eyes also: and that if you lay in the house of bondage and were despised of men, I out of my griefs had built a house in which to dwell until your coming, a treasury in which all that man had denied to you would be laid up for your healing, one hundredfold in increase?

There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain.

I often wonder what would have happened to those in pain if, instead of Christ, there had been a Christian.

Why is that true? Because when our friends excel us, they feel important; but when we excel them, they—or at least some of them—will feel inferior and envious.

the royal road to a person's heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most.

Similarly, unless we suffer from a remarkably restricted range of acquaintances, we all know that there are people who please God and have his blessing without being poor, hungry, grief-stricken, or persecuted. They

"King David was shaken. He went up to the room over the gateway and wept. As he went, he said: 'O my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you — O Absalom: my son, my son!'"