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Every day, we are surrounded by the resilience of developing characters and it’s almost impossible not to be touched by their beauty and fragility.

At the age of nine, the young Dante Alighieri fell hopelessly in love with Beatrice Portinari, a young woman of about the same age, whose image would haunt him for the rest of his life and inspire one of the most famous female characters in universal literature.

We are beings designed with an innate thirst to know and be known. This explains why we feel that this endless quest for connection and meaning transcends the status of a mere human trait. It is not just a peculiarity of human nature, but an essential requirement, a deep calling of our soul—a human imperative.

"I was wrong. I'm sorry"—these words can have a magical effect on a struggling relationship. But if we fail to show empathy, the apology will sound fake or hurt the offended person even more.

A man is about as big as the things that make him angry – Winston Churchill

Renee James was 18 when she decided to stop praying. If God was going to be silent, she thought, she would be silent too. She had been praying for years for the healing of her brothers, Sean and Niall, one suffering from autism and the other from Down syndrome. Yet there had been no answer.

"Logic suffers from a great logical fallacy: it believes that reality itself is of a logical nature. If it encounters something that cannot be understood logically, it will claim that this something doesn't exist, but only appears to exist..." (Lucian Blaga, Horizons and Stages)

Recently, I became a dad for the first time (that is, if you don’t count my miniature schnauzer, Banjo). Ever since my daughter was born, I’ve had a single thought going through my head: how do I ensure I don’t screw up my child?

We often associate divorce with the unhappiness of adults who reprehensibly decide to go their separate ways. For under-age brides Noora and Nujood, however, divorce was their escape from a nightmare of domestic violence and abuse, into which they were thrown at a young age by their own families.

God uses the traits we dislike as well as our weaknesses to create something great, beyond our abilities and imagination. This is the message that pervades the pages of "The Woman with the Book", the biography of the missionary Gladys Aylward.

It's the second time I've had to leave everything behind and flee. I am a 27-year-old designer and I live in the city of Vishhorod in the Kyiv region. I was born in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, in an area some people now call the Donetsk People's Republic.

Religion has often been maligned in both the press and popular culture. But could believing give you an edge in life?

Among the words of Jesus, I was first fascinated by His surprising and enigmatic counter-questions, which generated real clashes among his tempters. In the face of the questions that were supposed to leave Him speechless, He always had a more comprehensive vision, from the perspective of which the traps were reduced to ridiculous, absurd obstacles.

I have always imagined that well-being, bright prospects, good health and a clear purpose in life tend not to inspire questions about the meaning of life very often.

Nothing else on earth judges a person as ruthlessly as their own conscience, and truthfully, nothing else should. The painful process happens before and after the harm has been done.