Stephanie Dowrick quotes:

Your attitude to life is far more important in determining your happiness than your money, appearance, social status or talent.

Restraint offers a space between intention and action and the opportunity to protect others from actions or reactions that should exist only in your imagination

Love teaches you to care for others. It also gives you your best chance to grow up.

It should not be difficult to accept the idea that someone else is, in 'your experience of them', in part your self-creation. But it is difficult and sometimes impossible. Impossible because accepting the idea that you are in part creating your 'other' forces you to take on board a high degree of self responsibility. Few of us easily do that. p.234

Happiness--like love--is itself an attitude.

Opening to the sacred, we transform our vision of ourselves.

Sound crazy? It may well be, but it is precisely in relationships of intimacy that your craziness (and mine) will be hardest to conceal. p.215

What helps most is remembering that such a cry or attack or sly blow is a reflection of that other person's inner state; it is not an omniscient summary of you. Your reaction reflects your own inner state, and that can tell you which aspects of your own inner world are needy of attention. p.291

Happiness can come in a single moment. And in a single moment it can go again. But a single moment does not create it. Happiness is created through countless choices made and then made again throughout a lifetime. You are its host as well as its guest. You give it form, shape, individuality, texture, tone. And what it allows you to give can change your world. Happiness can be stillness. But it isn't still. It wraps, enchants, heals, consoles, soothes, delights, calms, inspires and connects. It is on your face and in your body. It is in your life and being.

How we feel about our own self, how well or little we know our own self, whether we feel alive inside, largely determine the quality of the time we spend alone, as well as the quality of the relationships we have with other people.

I have been using the word 'other' as though it were self-explanatory, yet who the 'other' is must always be something of a mystery. It is a mystery at an immediate level in the sense that no person is entirely knowable.

Imagine the world we would live in if we dared to see all of life as sacred - unconditionally.

It is precisely in relationships of intimacy that your craziness (and mine) will be hardest to conceal.

LISTEN to the small, quiet voice within that only ever guides you with love and compassion. Let yourself receive the inspiration of beauty and kindness. Let yourself rediscover peace in your heart. And, from that secure place, meet whatever comes.

Whatever our background, culture or race, what rewards us most powerfully and consistently are the most deceptively simple abilities of all: the ability to be kind.