You can enlarge the conversation by taking your focus off the negative and noticing all the things that are going right, taking a stand for the goodness of humanity.

You are not," said Norman Vincent Peale, "you are not what you think you are; but what you think, you are.

Is giving yourself a pep talk every day silly, superficial, childish? No, on the contrary, it is the very essence of sound psychology. "Our life is what our thoughts make it." These words are just as true today as they were eighteen centuries ago when Marcus Aurelius first wrote them in his book on Meditations: "Our life is what our thoughts make it.

When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.8

The divinity that shapes our ends is in ourselves. It is our very self…. All that a man achieves is the direct result of his own thoughts…. A man can only rise, conquer and achieve by lifting up his thoughts. He can only remain weak and abject and miserable by refusing to lift up his thoughts.

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. "Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there...

the Roman Empire, Marcus Aurelius, summed it up in eight words—eight words that can determine your destiny: "Our life is what our thoughts make it.

There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.

Your thoughts cannot be empty. As the old saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum. If you are not entertaining God's truth, you will be entertaining Satan's lies.

We have the ability and responsibility to keep God present in our minds, and those who do so will make steady progress toward him, for he will respond by making himself known to us.

Christian educators can work to alleviate the harsh, shame-based judgmentalism that marks so much moral teaching and replace it with teachings that give life, hope, and grace. Christian educators can give their full, critical, and honest effort to comparing, measuring, and discerning which traditions and teachings are most life-giving.

The ultimate freedom we have as individuals is the power to select what we will allow or require our minds to dwell upon and think about. By think we mean all the ways in which we are aware of things, including our memories, perceptions, and beliefs. The focus of your thoughts significantly affects everything else that happens in your life and evokes the feelings that frame your world and motivate your actions.