placing unrealistic expectations on others. After all, people will not respect us more than we respect ourselves.

The moral of this story is simple. Some moms are equipped by the hand of God to be "that mom." They have been formed with the three-C gene — Cooking, Crafting, and Cleaning come easily and naturally to them. Others of us have been delightfully chosen to provide the comic relief necessary to keep this world entertained. And to keep future therapists in business.

I can't expect a perfection in others I'm not even capable of living out myself.

Child," said the Voice, "I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own.

We often speak of a man who's done this successfully as a "self-made man." The appellation is usually spoken with a sense of admiration, but really it should be said in the same tones we might use of the dearly departed, or of a man who recently lost an arm—with sadness and regret. What the term really means is "an orphaned man who figured how to master some part of life on his own.

Let people feel the weight of who you are, and let them deal with it.

If there is a lesson from the lives of the men John Kennedy depicts in this book, if there is a lesson from his life and from his death, it is that in this world of ours none of us can afford to be lookers-on, the critics standing on the sidelines.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance that imitation is suicide that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion.

One of the goals of a spiritual practice is self-awareness, and one of the best tools of self-awareness is simple emotional vulnerability.

Maturation is the development from environmental support to self-support.

When each thing is unique in itself, there can be no comparison made.... There is only this strange recognition of present otherness.

Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.