12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Cain and Abel are really the first humans, since their parents were made directly by God, and not born in the standard manner. Cain and Abel live in history, not in Eden.

Standing up physically also implies and invokes and demands standing up metaphysically. Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being.

People vary in their resilience. An event that will wipe one person out can be shrugged off by another.

Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance,

If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself.

the adults in their lives had become so naively overprotective that they deluded themselves into thinking that not talking about suffering would in some way magically protect their children from it.

The society produced by Christianity was far less barbaric than the pagan—even the Roman—ones it replaced. Christian society at least recognized that feeding slaves to ravenous lions for the entertainment of the populace was wrong, even if many barbaric practices still existed. It objected to infanticide, to prostitution, and to the principle that

What do you know about yourself? You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can’t even set the clock on your microwave. Don’t over-estimate your self-knowledge.

Maybe the physical intimacy they undoubtedly shared should have been matched, as it often is not, by a corresponding psychological intimacy.