Psychology

A smooth sea never gave a skilled sailor, said Franklin D. Roosevelt, suggesting that without hardship, challenges and even failures, we cannot become our best selves.

I open the window and breathe in the air, trying to guess the weather. Floating around, mixed, are scents and miasms alike; it's hard to decipher these intricate clues.

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.

These days, we are free to believe anything and to be anything, at least in theory. However, if we gave history a closer look, we would realise that it is not beneficial for us to believe or be just anything. We agree with the biblical exhortation, often distorted by popular lore: "...test them all; hold on to what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

To have willpower does not mean saying you want to do something, it means to actually be doing it—André Maurois

The most important human relationship you'll ever have is with your spouse. Protect it at all costs.

Let’s begin with the introvert or extrovert question. We tend to be one or the other—or at least lean toward one or the other. Being either is not a problem, but it does impact how we handle life. Extroverts are likely to say that introverts are too quiet and introverts that extroverts are too noisy.

Many years have passed since I last lived with my brother. Recently, I decided to go and stay with him for a while. One day we both decided to visit a place in nature that neither of us had been to before. When we got there, it started to rain—while not very heavy, rain was not what either of us had wanted. But...

I accepted the challenge of writing about motivation thinking it was an easy task, after so many motivational speeches read, listened to, or given.

"Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope" (1 Thessalonians 4:13).

Although grief is a universal experience, we respond differently to its onslaught, so it's no wonder that words meant to comfort often add more suffering to an already heavy burden.

I spoke very little in my early years and my mother says that my silence scared her. She never knew what was going through my mind. She was afraid I was hiding something.

"If there is anything more heartbreaking than a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from hunger for the light." (Victor Hugo)

We have trouble understanding and accepting the image of a loving God, as we have grown too familiar with the type of love that offers itself only when it finds in a person the qualities that make them easy to love.

Responsible, achievement-oriented and highly principled – this is what a brief portrait of a perfectionist child looks like, explaining why, up to a certain point, this is the kind of child most parents dream of.