“You cannot fail at being yourself. A cat doesn’t try to be a tiger, and you shouldn’t try to be something you aren’t. You are a process, not a product. Your job is to discover what you are and create that creature.”

To me, animal communication seemed an insane idea, years ago; but my experience altered my life and my beliefs.

Love releases incredible energy that promotes the biochemistry of healing.

I see people who die a few minutes after a doctor tells them there is no hope of a cure. They give up and go. Others get angry and find joy in proving the doctor wrong. Something within them is challenged and hopeful. Hope is the divine motivator.

It’s hard to carry a child around with you, but fortunately, in most cases, you don’t have to ask a child for directions if you have a well-chosen role model ready to guide you. This is the next prescription:

I’m sure as an infant, no matter what I looked like, I felt like the most loved kid getting those massages. So I really think that was a big part of my growing and my brain developing.

When you love the unlovable and forgive the unforgivable, you’re free.

You too are a work of art.

You’ll see that love improves your vision and allows you to see more than your eye has ever seen before. But be forewarned:

What a shame to be so afraid of failure that you stop living. My wife has a great one-liner about failure: “Never consider yourself a failure-you can always serve as a bad example.” She is right. Failure can be a better teacher than success.

If you see what you do each day as your way of loving the world and helping it heal, then life gets to be a lot different. The difference between burning up and burning out is the difference between loving what you are doing and not loving it.

Not because I’m fascinated by the human body or want to understand death, but I like people and I want to help them. That also became my problem, because I couldn’t help everyone, I couldn’t fix everyone.

I grew up with sentiments such as, “Do what will make you happy, troubles are God’s redirections that something good will come from.

If I told patients to raise their blood levels of immune globulins or killer T cells, no one would know how. But if I can teach them to love themselves and others fully, the same changes happen automatically. The truth is: love heals.

You can find examples of how little we value ourselves everywhere you look. The signs on the front of the convenience stores where Stephen lives in Florida tell the story. Beer, ice, bread and milk are the big come-ons.

How will you know whether you are letting life teach you and nourish you? If your physical senses become more sensitive to the beauty you see.

God is in everyone and everything. When we save each other or guide each other or just love each other.

And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.

People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.

The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.

if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of cloths.

Our future lies in being a high skilled, high innovation, free enterprise nation.

Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.

Being the best at whatever talent you have, that’s what stimulates life.

To hunger and thirst after righteousness is when nothing in the world can fascinate us so much as being near God.