182 Quotes by Gudjon Bergmann

If you are able to show goodness to yourself, your family, friends, and maybe to some in your community, you are doing better than most. In fact, it can be harder to show goodness to those who stand close to you than to those who are in faraway places. If more people tended to their own gardens, all of society would flourish as a result.

You can’t take it personally when something you have written sucks. Just delete it and write something else.

History has taught us that when understanding and tolerance are fostered, people of different faiths can live together in harmony. Regrettably, history has also taught us the opposite, that such states of equilibrium can quickly degenerate and succumb to rhetoric of anger and fear, sometimes leading to violence and even war. A balance of mutual respect and tolerance needs to be maintained through good works. Interrelations need continual nurturing.

Co-dependency essentially revolves around the sentence: “I am not enough.” A co-dependent person will always need another person to validate their worth, their feelings, their ideas and even their existence. This either shows itself as a need to manipulate and control surroundings; or as a need to bend over backwards to make other people feel good, the reason being that “I can’t feel good if you don’t feel good.

And yet there is something there. People of faith share a camaraderie that is hard to reproduce in other social circumstances, and they often display a cheerful, albeit oddly naïve, attitude.

In an ideal world, both experifaith and storyfaith would provide spiritual aspirants of all faiths with guidance. Storyfaith would preserve tradition and teach morals through parables and examples. Experifaith would provide the blueprint for a personal path to follow. In the context of chocolate, storyfaith is a lecture about chocolate, including information about origins and fables about positive attributes, while experifaith is the literal act of tasting the chocolate.

That’s the problem, isn’t it? Our youth enamored society hides death from us, makes us believe that we will live forever," Jack asserted, rather forcefully. "We don’t want to see death. We even hide old people so that we don’t have to be reminded of our own mortality. In other cultures, old age is celebrated, embraced even. Death is a part of life.

Western spiritual seekers began picking and choosing from Eastern philosophies based on their preferences. Wanting to get away from myth and dogma, they mixed and matched, shook and stirred, mashed and meshed, blended and juiced . . . and in the process, well, they lost their way. They created a number of philosophical inconsistencies.

In essence, oversimplification tends to take a partial truth and make it all powerful.