We can live out our lives, and in the end realize that we never really ‘lived’ a day in our lives.

I pretend to give gifts that people pretend to be gifts so that I can pretend that I gave something that actually cost me something. And what pretending or this sort gives me is the gift of a pretend life.

Just because we chose to reject the truth does mean that such an option was actually available to us.

Possibly the most debilitating deception of all is to create a god of my own making, fool myself into believing that this limp god of mine is the true God, and then construct the entirety of my life on this flamboyantly fictional character. Possibly the most devastating realization of all is when the real God shows up, and in the showing up all of this come crashing down.

Honor is where I unashamedly declare that every success is the work of my God, where flattery is pretending that every success is the work of my hands. And while pursing honor will insure the death of flattery, pursuing flattery will insure the death of everything.

If truth be told, the easy road is nothing more than an armchair in clever disguise. And if you look around, it seems that there are a whole lot of people in the furniture business.

Keeping a promise is too often contingent upon how we feel about keeping the promise, and that means that what we’ve really been promised is the promise that the promise is not a promise.

Truth has legs that are longer than any of our lies. In time it will catch up to us, not because the truth has longer legs, but because lies haven’t got a ‘leg to stand on’ much less any legs to run on.

To give optimism a hand up, we must come to understand that behind the mask of pessimism there is nothing more than fear bent on knocking us down.