Quotes from Richard Paul Evans

The Golden Rule is a two-edged sword. If some of us treated others as we treat ourselves, we would be jailed.

The more I study history the more I realize how little mankind has changed. There are no new scripts, just different actors.

Grief isn't a luxury; it's an appropriate response to loss. You don't just will it away. If you allow it to run its course, it will fade with time, but if you ignore it or pretend it doesn't exist, it only gets worse.

I don't believe society has ever grown more tolerant. It just changes targets.

fear doesn't listen to reason it takes it own counsel

The only true love is grace. All else is a counterfeit.

In college I took a social psychology course, something I thought useful for a career in advertising. Psychologists tested the story of the Good Samaritan. What they learned gives us reason to pause. The greatest determinant of who stopped to help the stranger in need was not compassion, morality, or religious creed. It was those who had the time. Makes me wonder if I have time to do good. Apparently, Angel does.

The well from which we receive grace is only filled by sharing it with others. --- Charles James's Diary

They are like pythons in the jungle. The smallest child can crush a python egg. But let the snake hatch and grow and the python with squeeze and devour the child.

Grief is a powerful force that settles in the heart like a dark, heavy fog. It was familiar territory to me.

Any fool can attack an army and die. A wise man doesn't plan an attack; he plans a victory.

I would say that I was without faith, but no one is truly faithless; they just have faith in the wrong things: fear and defeat.

I sighed. "Now what do I do?" He leaned against my wall. "What do you want to do?" "Since when has that mattered?" "It's always mattered. It doesn't mean you'll get what you want, but what you want always matters. That's what defines you.

Sometimes our cruelest acts come not from meaning to do wrong but from not trying hard enough not to.

The price of happiness is the risk of losing it.

It's easy to hate the game when your losing.

Some people aren't meant to fight. They're meant to pick up the pieces.

what we see clearest in others is what we most avoid seeing in ourselves.

Just like our story, the original Christmas tales were stories of searching, not so much for the lost, as for the familiar. Mary and Joseph sought in Bethlehem- the home of their familial ancestry- a place to start their own family; the three kings from the East journeyed beneath the sentinel star to find the King of Kings; and the shepherds sought a child in a place most familiar to them: a manger.

Humility is the power to admit that you may be wrong. Admitting to false beliefs is not weakness, it is the first step on the path to truth. And make no mistake, there is no such thing as individual truth, only individual perception. Perception is subjective, but truth isn't.

We chain ourselves to those we don't forgive.

Ostin always said that when it came to snakes the rule of thumb is "the more pretty, the more dangerous." I think he said the same thing about girls.

To forgive is to unlock the cage of another's folly to set ourselves free.

Trauma has a way of indelibly linking the incidentals to the profound.