“I learned to say, “You didn’t die when you were supposed to so what’s going on?”, and they always had a story to tell me.”

I truly feel the best doctors are ones who are criticized by nurses, patients and family. They do not make excuses and learn from their mistakes.

Bobby and I were married in 1954 and by now we know that anger does not mean “I don’t love you” or “I want a divorce.” It means, “I am wounded and in need of love, and I feel safe telling you about it because you are my family.”

None of us are going to have perfect lives. Our own vision of what we think is good maybe different from what He [God] thinks. And we forget that. We think we know what’s best and we don’t.

What I learned was to live in my heart and to do what will make my happy, and that was not selfishness. It didn’t matter what job I took, my mother’s answer was, “Do what will make you happy.”

If you talk to your body, it will listen.

It can be tempting to blame others for our loss of direction. We get lots of information about life but little education in life from parents, teachers, and other authority figures who should know better from their experience. Information is about facts.

I had patients who didn’t die because they had too many pets to try to find homes for. It’s why women live longer than men with the same health problems.

You can’t control the world, but when you control your thoughts, you bring order.

What if Jesus was the only normal person who ever lived?

Be grateful simply for being alive. When you are grateful for life, pure and simple, your life becomes one you can be grateful for. That may strike you as circular or even backward logic, but your attitude really does have an effect on how things work out.

Hoping means seeing that the outcome you want is possible and then working for it.

We destroy ourselves when we stop feeling. If you bury your feelings within you, you become a graveyard.

To me, God is an intelligent, loving, conscious energy and why do I say that? Well you need energy to create. You have to have a source. It’s undifferentiated energy which has intelligence or it couldn’t create.

Education is about wisdom and the knowledge of how to love and survive.

Remember that an act of love always benefits at least two people.

You still won’t be perfect, but success isn’t about perfection-it is about authenticity. You are a success if you are being your real, authentic self.

What I’ve learned about teaching is to refer back to the root of that word, which is educo, which means “to pull from.

But one of the things I learned from improvising is that all of life is an improvisation, whether you like it or not.

A man enters arrangements which it does not fall to him to determine, but only to learn and respect the rules.

We don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.

It is impossible to remain indifferent to Japanese culture. It is a different civilisation where all you have learnt must be forgotten.

The trick is to learn a positive lesson from all of life’s negative moments.

Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.