If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage as if it were God.

Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.

I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you.

Most people simply aren’t unhappy enough with the known to trade it for the unknown

Stella says the name for the house where she and Ms. Havisham live is Stasis, Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew, or all three to dub the domicile Enough House. In a healthy soul, this might mean contentment. Or, in seeing what we have as Enough, this can mean we are not open to vulnerability, generosity, or dependence on those who might threaten our Stasis.

Decades of the seniority rule had conferred influence in the Senate not on men who broke new ground but on men who were careful not to.