Journey Of College Life Quotes

Adversity quickens the mind, awakens the spirit and strength the soul.

The world needs great inspires, who will encourage every living soul to reach their highest potential. You can be one.

Failure is a sign post, directing the right road for life’s journey.

Focus on your destination but enjoy every sacred moments of the journey

Education is one of the greatest gift for mankind. Each one of us must seek this enlightenment.

The obstacles were intended to be a distraction from the goal. You must keep a persistence focus to realise the goal.

When A Man Is Trying To Win The Heart Of A Woman,He Studies Her.He Learns Her Likes,Dislikes,Habits And Hobbies.But After He Wins Her Heart And Marries Her,He Often Stops Learning About Her.If The Amount He Studied Her Before Marriage Was Equal To A High School Degree,He Should Continue To Learn About Her Until He Gains A College Degree,A Master's Degree And Ultimately A Doctorate Degree.It Is A Lifelong Journey That Draws His Heart Ever Closer To Hers.

He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured. ... Connell's initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterward feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything. Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he had been making for a new story, and he felt the old beat of pleasure inside his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.

The mistake we make in putting emphasis on happiness is to forget that life is a process, defined by activity and motion, and to search instead for the one perfect state of being. There can be no such state, since change is the essence of life. Scholars who study meaning in life distinguish between synchronic meaning and diachronic meaning. Synchronic meaning depends on your state of being at any one moment in time: you are happy because you are out in the sunshine. Diachronic meaning depends on the journey you are on: you are happy because you are making progress toward a college degree. If we permit ourselves to take inspiration from what we have learned about ontology, it might suggest that we focus more on diachronic meaning at the expense of synchronic. The essence of life is change, and we can aim to make change part of how we find meaning in it.

Pursuit of desires, divine passions.

[My mother] was so brainwashed that when Kim Il Sung died she started to panic. It was like God himself had died. "How can Earth still spin on its axis?" she wondered. The laws of physics she had studied in college were overcome by the propaganda that were drilled into her all her life.

So far in my life, I’ve been a lawyer. I’ve been a vice president at a hospital and the director of a nonprofit that helps young people build meaningful careers. I’ve been a working-class black student at a fancy mostly white college. I’ve been the only woman, the only African American, in all sorts of rooms. I’ve been a bride, a stressed-out new mother, a daughter torn up by grief. And until recently, I was the First Lady of the United States of America—a job that’s not officially a job, but that nonetheless has given me a platform like nothing I could have imagined. It challenged me and humbled me, lifted me up and shrank me down, sometimes all at once. I’m just beginning to process what took place over these last years—from the moment in 2006 when my husband first started talking about running for president to the cold morning this winter when I climbed into a limo with Melania Trump, accompanying her to her husband’s inauguration. It’s been quite a ride.

If life's journey be endless, where is its goal? The answer is, it is everywhere. We are in a palace which has no end, but which we have reached. By exploring it and extending our relationship with it we are ever making it more and more our own. The infant is born in the same universe where lives the adult of ripe mind. But its position is not like a schoolboy who has yet to learn his alphabet, finding himself in a college class. The infant has it own joy of life because the world is not a mere road, but a home, of which it will have more and more as it grows up in wisdom. With our road that gain is at every step, for it is the road and the home in one; it leads us on yet gives us shelter.

College is the greatest vacation anyone can take before real life begins. CR 2002 Hear the Calliope: A sentimental journey on the Earth Ride

As a twenty-one-year-old college student, Daisy Richmond’s answer to the question “If you knew you were going to die in one month, what would you do?” was full of adventure and travel to exotic lands. As a twenty-seven-year-old woman who is faced with a recurrence of breast cancer, her answer is very different. Before I Go is the poignant story of Daisy’s journey to navigate the unexpected twists and turns of life, and the painful process of letting go of everything but love.

It’s YOUR journey. Ask yourself who you are, where you want to go, and how you’d like to get there. Graciously accept advice from everyone, but don’t look left and right and wonder why you’re not taking the path of your peers. Enjoy the path you’re on and make the most of it. Carpe College!

Like many of the kids I write about, I once was a runaway myself—and a few (but not all) of the other writers in the series also come from troubled backgrounds. That early experience influences my fiction, no doubt, but I don't think it's necessary to come from such a background in order to write a good Bordertown tale. To me, "running away to Bordertown" is as much a metaphorical act as an actual one. These tales aren't just for kids who have literally run away from home, but also for every kid, every person, who "runs away" from a difficult or constrictive past to build a different kind of life in some new place. Some of us "run away" to college . . . or we "run away" to a distant city or state . . . or we "run away" from a safe, secure career path to follow our passions or artistic muse. We "run away" from places we don't belong, or from families we have never fit into. We "run away" to find ourselves, or to find others like ourselves, or to find a place where we finally truly belong. And that kind of "running away from home"—the everyday, metaphorical kind—can be just as hard, lonely, and disorienting as crossing the Nevernever to Bordertown . . . particularly when you're in your teens, or early twenties, and your resources (both inner and outer) are still limited. I want to tell stories for young people who are making that journey, or contemplating making that journey. Stories in which friendship, community, and art is the "magic" that lights the way. (speaking about the Borderland series she "founded")

The sleep seems to descend on females early in life. Studies conducted by Harvard professor Carol Gilligan and Colby College professor Lyn Mikel Brown from 1986 to 1990 have revealed that something truly phenomenal happens to girls around adolescence.8 They undergo a gradual change in which they lose their feisty spirit, courage, and willingness to speak out—qualities they had known in girlhood. Around this time their truth becomes silenced, held back. They become afraid of conflict with males, because they know on some level that males hold the power. They become—perhaps forever—good little girls, settling into the clichés and limits imposed on their

The United States is also losing the rugged pioneering spirit that once defined it. In 1850, Herman Melville boasted that “we are the pioneers of the world, the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World.”7 Today many of the descendants of these pioneers are too terrified of tripping up to set foot on any new path. The problem starts with school. In 2013, a school district in Maryland banned, among other things, pushing children on swings, bringing homemade food into school, and distributing birthday invitations on school grounds.8 It continues in college, where professors have provided their charges with “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.” It extends to every aspect of daily life. McDonald’s prints warning signs on its cups of coffee pointing out that “this liquid may be hot.” Winston Churchill once said to his fellow countrymen, “We have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.”9 Today, thanks to a malign combination of litigation, regulation, and pedagogical fashion, sugar-candy people are everywhere.

And I was looking for escape routes all the time. Ways to not fully be there, to be distracted by other lives, the lives of people I knew from high school and college that were happening in different states and cities. I would waste hours comparing my life to theirs, sitting the two of them side by side and circling the things that seemed out of place in my own life, like the “What’s Wrong?” pictures in the back of the Highlights magazines. I don’t exactly know what happened that night after

I’m turning fifty in five months. I mention to the healer how it feels a little late in my life to begin this kind of journey. As healers sometimes do, she tells me an interesting story about her parents… It seems her father was thinking of starting college at the ripe old age of 24. He was working, so he’d have to go at night. After figuring out the timing, he told his wife (her mom), “If I do this, I’ll be 29 years old before I graduate!” His wife replied, “How old will you be if you don’t do it?” He enrolled. Smart parents. Smart healer.

be apart. Despite getting rejected by my top-choice school, I was starting to really believe in myself again based on all the positive feedback we continued to get on our videos. And besides, I knew I could always reapply to Emerson the following year and transfer. • • • College started out great, with the best part being my newly found freedom. I was finally on my own and able to make my own schedule. And not only was Amanda with me, I’d already made a new friend before the first day of classes from a Facebook page that was set up for incoming freshmen. I started chatting with a pretty girl named Chloe who mentioned that she was also going to do the film and video concentration. Fitchburg isn’t located in the greatest neighborhood, but the campus has lots of green lawns and old brick buildings that look like mansions. My dorm room was a forced triple—basically a double that the school added bunk beds to in order to squeeze one extra person in. I arrived first and got to call dibs on the bunk bed that had an empty space beneath it. I moved my desk under it and created a little home office for myself. I plastered the walls with Futurama posters and made up the bed with a new bright green comforter and matching pillows. My roommates were classic male college stereotypes—the football player and the stoner. Their idea of decorating was slapping a Bob Marley poster and a giant ad for Jack Daniels on the wall.

Some people will tell you that Toronto, in the summer, is the nothing more than a cesspool of pollution, garbage, and the smells of a hundred ethnicities competing for top spot in a race won historically by curry, garlic, and the occasional cauldron of boiled cabbage. Take a walk down College Street West, Gerrard Street East, or the Danforth, and you'll see; then, they add—these people, complaining—that the stench is so pervasive, so incorrigible, nor merely for lack of wind, but for the ninety-nine percent humidity, which, after a rainstorm, adds an eradicable bottom-note of sweaty Birkenstocks and the organic tang of decaying plant life. This much is true; there is, however, more to the story. Take a walk down the same streets and you'll find racks of the most stunning saris—red with navy brocade, silver, canary, vermillion and chocolate; marts with lahsun and adrak, pyaz and pudina; windows of gelato, zeppole, tiramisu; dusty smoke shops with patio-bistros; you'll find dove-white statuary of Olympian goddesses, mobs in blue jerseys, primed for the World Cup—and more, still, the compulsory banter of couples who even after forty years can turn foul words into the bawdiest, more unforgettable laughter (and those are just the details). Beyond them is the container, the big canvas brushed with parks and valleys and the interminable shore; a backdrop of ferries and islands, gulls and clouds—sparkles of a million wave-tips as the sun decides which colours to leave on its journey to new days. No, Toronto, in the summer, is the most paradisiacal place in the world.

He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured. When someone mentioned the austerity protests that night in the Stag’s Head, Sadie threw her hands up and said: Not politics, please! Connell’s initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterward feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything. Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he had been making for a new story, and he felt the old beat of pleasure inside his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.

A Life like Mine: Round and round, round and round, this is how life is feeling at the very moment. Why on earth, would anyone want to live in a life that is never ending chaos? Not me, she thought to herself. Gloria Jacobson, 19 years old, was on her way to a life of success when she was finally looking into a life of school, love, and a family that could look up to her for being the next honor roll student. Well, ok, technically speaking, she wasn’t an “Honor roll” Student, and she wasn’t in love yet. But she did have one thing, and that was a family that loved her. Skeptical or not, as she was, she was headed to sleep after a long day’s journey through thoughts and school. She went to a College Prep school, so it wasn’t exactly the easiest. In fact, sometimes school to her could become one of the toughest things. She rolled up her jean legs and through on her purple hooded jacket then slipped out the door. “Mom will hopefully allow her to go to the school ball tomorrow night”; she thought as she crossed her fingers. It was going to be a school formal, and all the way through elementary and middle school, she wasn’t ever allowed to go. Why on earth wouldn’t her parents ever let her just be a normal teenage girl. After all she only turns 20, towards the end of graduation. Her entire life was devoted to school work, college apps, and volunteer work at different places after school, and church activities. She never seemed to have any time for boys or even friendships at this time. She practically had to beg for the ones that she already had. ~part of my story. :)

A circle of trust is a group of people who know how to sit quietly "in the woods" with each other and wait for the shy soul to show up. The relationships in such a group are not pushy but patient; they are not confrontational but compassionate; they are filled not with expectations and demands but with abiding faith in the reality of the inner teacher and in each person's capacity to learn from it. The poet Rumi captures the essence of this way of being together: "A circle of lovely, quiet people / becomes the ring on my finger."6 Few of us have experienced large-scale communities that possess these qualities, but we may have had one-on-one relationships that do. By reflecting on the dynamics of these small-scale circles of trust, we can sharpen our sense of what a larger community of solitudes might look like-and remind ourselves that two people who create safe space for the soul can support each other's inner journey. Think, for example, about someone who helped you grow toward true self. When I think about such a person, it is my father who first comes to mind. Though he was himself a hardworking and successful businessman, he did not press me toward goals that were his rather than mine. Instead, he made space for me to grow into my own selfhood. Throughout high school, I got mediocre grades-every one of which I earned-although I always did quite well on standardized intelligence tests. I look back with amazement on the fact that not once did my father demand that I "live up to my potential." He trusted that if I had a gift for academic life, it would flower in its own time, as it did when I went to college. The people who help us grow toward true self offer unconditional love, neither judging us to be deficient nor trying to force us to change but accepting us exactly as we are. And yet this unconditional love does not lead us to rest on our laurels. Instead, it surrounds us with a charged force field that makes us want to grow from the inside out -a force field that is safe enough to take the risks and endure the failures that growth requires.

Interestingly enough, creative geniuses seem to think a lot more like horses do. These people also spend a rather large amount of time engaging in that favorite equine pastime: doing nothing. In his book Fire in the Crucible: The Alchemy of Creative Genius, John Briggs gathers numerous studies illustrating how artists and inventors keep their thoughts pulsating in a field of nuance associated with the limbic system. In order to accomplish this feat against the influence of cultural conditioning, they tend to be outsiders who have trouble fitting into polite society. Many creative geniuses don’t do well in school and don’t speak until they’re older, thus increasing their awareness of nonverbal feelings, sensations, and body language cues. Einstein is a classic example. Like Kathleen Barry Ingram, he also failed his college entrance exams. As expected, these sensitive, often highly empathic people feel extremely uncomfortable around incongruent members of their own species, and tend to distance themselves from the cultural mainstream. Through their refusal to fit into a system focusing on outside authority, suppressed emotion, and secondhand thought, creative geniuses retain and enhance their ability to activate the entire brain. Information flows freely, strengthening pathways between the various brain functions. The tendency to separate thought from emotion, memory, and sensation is lessened. This gives birth to a powerful nonlinear process, a flood of sensations and images interacting with high-level thought functions and aspects of memory too complex and multifaceted to distill into words. These elements continue to influence and build on each other with increasing ferocity. Researchers emphasize that the entire process is so rapid the conscious mind barely registers that it is happening, let alone what is happening. Now a person — or a horse for that matter — can theoretically operate at this level his entire life and never receive recognition for the rich and innovative insights resulting from this process. Those called creative geniuses continuously struggle with the task of communicating their revelations to the world through the most amenable form of expression — music, visual art, poetry, mathematics. Their talent for innovation, however, stems from an ability to continually engage and process a complex, interconnected, nonlinear series of insights. Briggs also found that creative geniuses spend a large of amount of time “doing nothing,” alternating episodes of intense concentration on a project with periods of what he calls “creative indolence.” Albert Einstein once remarked that some of his greatest ideas came to him so suddenly while shaving that he was prone to cut himself with surprise.

Sharon passed around a handout: "Triangle of Self-Actualization" by Abraham Maslow. The levels of human motivation. It resembled the nutrition triangle put out by the FDA, with five horizontal levels of multiple colors. I vaguely remembered it from my one college psychology course in the 1970's. "Very applicable with refugees," Sharon said. "Maslow theorized that one could not move to a higher level until the prior level was satisfied. The first level, the triangle base, is physiological needs. Like food and water. Until a person has enough to eat and drink, that's all one would be concerned with." I'd never experienced not being able to satisfy my thirst or hunger, but it sounded logical that that would be my only concern in such a situation. For the Lost Boys, just getting enough food and water had been a daily struggle. I wondered what kind of impact being stuck at the bottom level for the last fourteen years would have on a person, especially a child and teen. "The second level is safety and security. Home. A sanctuary. A safe place." Like not being shot at or having lions attack you. They hadn't had much of level two, either. Even Kakuma hadn't been safe. A refugee camp couldn't feel like home. "The third level is social. A sense of belonging." Since they'd been together, they must have felt like they belonged, but perhaps not on a larger scale, having been displaced from home and living in someone else's country. "Once a person has food, shelter, family and friends, they can advance to the fourth level, which is ego. Self-esteem." I'd never thought of those things occurring sequentially, but rather simultaneously, as they did in my life. If I understood correctly, working on their self-esteem had not been a large concern to them, if one at all. That was bound to affect them eventually. In what way remained to be seen. They'd been so preoccupied with survival that issues of self-worth might overwhelm them at first. A sure risk for insecurity and depression. The information was fascinating and insightful, although worrisome in terms of Benson, Lino, and Alepho. It also made me wonder about us middle-and upper-class Americans. We seldom worried about food, except for eating too much, and that was not what Maslow had been referring to. Most of us had homes and safety and friends and family. That could mean we were entirely focused on that fourth level: ego. Our efforts to make ourselves seem strong, smart, rich, and beautiful, or young were our own kind of survival skill. Perhaps advancing directly to the fourth level, when the mind was originally engineered for the challenges of basic survival, was why Prozac and Zoloft, both antidepressants, were two of the biggest-selling drugs in America. "The pinnacle of the triangle," Sharon said, "is the fifth level. Self-actualization. A strong and deeply felt belief that as a person one has value in the world. Contentment with who one is rather than what one has. Secure in ones beliefs. Not needing ego boosts from external factors. Having that sense of well-being that does not depend on the approval of others is commonly called happiness." Happiness, hard to define, yet obvious when present. Most of us struggled our entire lives to achieve it, perhaps what had brought some of us to a mentoring class that night.

priests in the seminary were no strangers to physical abuse. Punching, slapping, and beatings were not unusual. I remember one priest in particular who taught Latin. He used to walk up and down the aisles cracking kids with his belt the way that someone would slap another guy with a towel at the gym. You could hear his footsteps walking up and down the aisle, never knowing whether this would be your day to feel the belt on your back. You could actually see on his face the great pleasure that he got from abusing these young boys in this way. He was really a sick person. Some of these priests had not completed any formal training in teaching and had no real desire to help children learn. Years later when I was in college, I saw this same priest in the parking lot. He told me that he was there to take a few teaching courses. I can only hope that someone stepped in to discipline this man and change the way that he treated his students. But it’s difficult to imagine that he was capable of that kind of dramatic change.

Take a great adventure to a place, learn the rich history and make your own observation about the place.

Day by day, there exists the possibility for the dream to come true.

I often refer to the great mythologist and American author Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) in this book. He used the designation of „hero“ to describe individuals who embark on the monumental psychological task of expanding and evolving consciousness and famously charted this journey. This hero‘s journey begins in our inherent state of blindness, separation, and suffering and progresses on a circular (as opposed to linear) route made up of stages shared by myths and legends spanning all cultures and epochs. From Buddha to Christ, Arjuna to Alice in Wonderland, the hero‘s journey is one of passing through a set of trials and phases: seeking adventure, encountering mentors, slaying demons, finding treasure, and returning home to heal others. Tibetan Buddhism‘s and Campbell‘s descriptions of the hero both offer a travel-tested road map of a meaningful life, a path of becoming fully human – we don‘t have to wander blindly, like college kids misguidedly hazed by a fraternity, or spiritual seekers abused in the thrall of a cult leader. The hero archetype is relevant to each of us, irrespective of our background, gender, temperament, or challenges, because we each have a hero gene within us capable of following the path, facing trials, and awakening for the benefit of others. Becoming a hero is what the Lam Rim describes as taking full advantage of our precious human embodiment. It‘s what Campbell saw as answering the call to adventure and following our bliss – not the hedonic bliss of chasing a high or acquiring more stuff, but the bliss of the individual soul, which, like a mountain stream, reaches and merges with the ocean of universal reality. (p. 15)

In this covenant God said that He would not ever have a flood that would cut off all life on the earth. God went on to say that He would put rainbows in the sky as a sign to all living creatures, and whenever the rainbow shows up, He would see it and remember that covenant. Three times in that biblical passage it talks about all living creatures being included in that covenant. As one of my college professors used to say, "all" means "all." All living creatures includes pets. In the last part of that passage it says the covenant, or agreement, is "everlasting.

In the race of life, the starting line is not the point of focus, since the individual has minimum impact on that spot. What you do on your journey through is not only crucial, but it is also important in determining where and how you end…

Barefoot to Boardroom chronicles my unique journey and important milestones. My rise from an impoverished upbringing to an accomplished educator is noteworthy. As you follow my journey, you will meet people who nurtured me. You will gain insight into my relationship with my sons, a turbulent marriage, and an intriguing rebirth. The book also chronicles my stay in the :United States as well as my presidency at the College or the Bahamas and my other activities in education. I wanted to share my story because I believe that it would motivate people around the world to live up to their full potential. The story shows that it does not matter where you start in life, but where you reach in life. The book is written as an inspirational guide for old and young people who believe that life has dealt them a bad hand. The book is unique in that it transcends age and it is a good read.

When I was a child and told my mother I didn't felt this was my planet, she thought I was schizophrenic or autistic. When later I finished a college degree and started working in different countries, she called me monster and started threatening me. Nearly 40 years later, when I was making a living from the books I wrote based on what I know, and making 6 times more money than she ever will, she apologized. I'm just not sure why or what she was apologizing for. I had already forgiven her ignorance when realizing nobody would ever believe the truth but myself. I had to go the whole way alone. Nobody was going to come with me on this very long, painful and challenging journey that humans call life but for me was much more than that, it was my mission, of changing their whole future far beyond the time when I'm gone. She was never my mother but merely the human body that gave me birth. In that sense, I am a monster, because I had no love. I had to find that too, on my own.

When I was a child and told my mother I didn't felt this was my planet, she thought I was schizophrenic or autistic. When later I finished a college degree and started working in different countries, she called me monster and started threatening me. Nearly 40 years later, when I was making a living from the books I wrote based on what I know, and making 6 times more money than she ever will, she apologized. I'm just not sure why or what she was apologizing for. I had already forgiven her ignorance when realizing nobody would ever believe the truth but myself. I had to go the whole way alone. Nobody was going to come with me on this very long, painful and challenging journey that humans call life but for me was much more than that, it was my mission, of changing their whole future far beyond the time when I'm gone. She was never my mother but merely the human body that gave me birth. In that sense, I was a monster, because I had no love. I had to find that too, on my own.

At the bottom of the hill, after Boston College, the route passes St. Ignatius Church on the right. It was here that textile worker Doroteo Flores of Guatemala was running down the hill in 1952 when he looked to the church for support. He had hoped that a win at the world’s greatest race might help him to find employment or notoriety and allow him to make a better life for himself and his family. With a prayer in his heart, the Roman Catholic regained his stride and the will to win. “Coming over the hills I asked my God, ‘How do I do it?’ ” he said. “He listened and gave me strength, and I ran with greater sense of purpose.” After winning Boston in 1952, Flores’s home country named the national stadium in Guatemala City after him.

The most famous child survivor of the Holocaust in the 1950s was not Anne Frank—after all, she didn’t survive—but a young woman named Hannah Bloch Kohner. NBC television’s This Is Your Life was one of television’s first reality shows, in which host Ralph Edwards surprised a guest, often a celebrity, by reuniting him or her with friends and family members the guest hadn’t heard from in years. The program didn’t shy away from either political controversy or questionable sentimentality, as when guest Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who had survived the atomic bombing of Hirsohima in 1945, was introduced to the copilot of the Enola Gay. On May 27, 1953, This Is Your Life ambushed a beautiful young woman in the audience, escorted her to the stage, and proceeded, in a matter of minutes, to package, sanitize, and trivialize the Holocaust for a national television audience. Hannah Bloch Kohner’s claim to fame was that she had survived Auschwitz before emigrating, marrying, and settling in Los Angeles. She was the first Holocaust survivor to appear on a national television entertainment program. “Looking at you, it’s hard to believe that during seven short years of a still short life, you lived a lifetime of fear, terror, and tragedy,” host Edwards said to Kohner in his singsong baritone. “You look like a young American girl just out of college, not at all like a survivor of Hitler’s cruel purge of German Jews.” He then reunited a stunned Kohner with Eva, a girl with whom she’d spent eight months in Auschwitz, intoning, “You were each given a cake of soap and a towel, weren’t you, Hannah? You were sent to the so-called showers, and even this was a doubtful procedure, because some of the showers had regular water and some had liquid gas, and you never knew which one you were being sent to. You and Eva were fortunate. Others were not so fortunate, including your father and mother, your husband Carl Benjamin. They all lost their lives in Auschwitz.” It was an extraordinary lapse of sympathy, good taste, and historical accuracy—history that, if not common knowledge, had at least been documented on film. It would be hard to explain how Kohner ever made it on This Is Your Life to be the Holocaust’s beautiful poster girl if you didn’t happen to know that her husband—a childhood sweetheart who had emigrated to the United States in 1938—was host Ralph Edwards’s agent. Hannah Bloch’s appearance was a small, if crass, oasis of public recognition for Holocaust survivors—and child survivors especially—in a vast desert of indifference. It would be decades before the media showed them this much interest again.

A part war drama, part coming-of-age story, part spiritual pilgrimage, Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin is the story of a young woman who experienced more hardships before graduating high school than most people do in a lifetime. Yet her heartaches are only half the story; the other half is a story of resilience, of leaving her lifelong home in Germany to find a new home, a new life, and a new love in America. Mildred Schindler Janzen has given us a time capsule of World War II and the years following it, filled with pristinely preserved memories of a bygone era. Ken Gire New York Times bestselling author of All the Gallant Men The memoir of Mildred Schindler Janzen will inform and inspire all who read it. This is a work that pays tribute to the power and resiliency of the human spirit to endure, survive, and overcome in pursuit of the freedom and liberty that all too many take for granted. Kirk Ford, Jr., Professor Emeritus, History Mississippi College Author of OSS and the Yugoslav Resistance, 1943-1945 A compelling first-person account of life in Germany during the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party. A well written, true story of a young woman overcoming the odds and rising above the tragedies of loss of family and friends during a savage and brutal war, culminating in her triumph in life through sheer determination and will. A life lesson for us all. Col. Frank Janotta (Retired), Mississippi Army National Guard Mildred Schindler Janzen’s touching memoir is a testimony to God’s power to deliver us from the worst evil that men can devise. The vivid details of Janzen’s amazing life have been lovingly mined and beautifully wrought by Sherye Green into a tender story of love, gratitude, and immeasurable hope. Janzen’s rich, post-war life in Kansas serves as a powerful reminder of the great promise of America. Troy Matthew Carnes, Author of Rasputin’s Legacy and Dudgeons and Daggers World War II was horrific, and we must never forget. Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin is a must-read that sheds light on the pain the Nazis and then the Russians inflicted on the German Jews and the German people. Mildred Schindler Janzen’s story, of how she and her mother and brother survived the war and of the special document that allowed Mildred to come to America, is compelling. Mildred’s faith sustained her during the war's horrors and being away from her family, as her faith still sustains her today. Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin is a book worth buying for your library, so we never forget. Cynthia Akagi, Ph.D. Northcentral University I wish all in the world could read Mildred’s story about this loving steel magnolia of a woman who survived life under Hitler’s reign. Mildred never gave up, but with each suffering, grew stronger in God’s strength and eternal hope. Beautifully written, this life story will captivate, encourage, and empower its readers to stretch themselves in life, in love, and with God, regardless of their circumstances. I will certainly recommend this book. Renae Brame, Author of Daily Devotions with Our Beloved, God’s Peaceful Waters Flow, and Snow and the Eternal Hope How utterly inspiring to read the life story of a woman whose every season reflects God’s safe protection and unfailing love. When young Mildred Schindler escaped Nazi Germany, only to have her father taken by Russians and her mother and brother hidden behind Eastern Europe’s Iron Curtain, she courageously found a new life in America. Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin is her personal witness to God’s guidance and provision at every step of that perilous journey. How refreshing to view a full life from beginning to remarkable end – always validating that nothing is impossible with God. Read this book and you will discover the author’s secret to life: “My story is a declaration that choosing joy and thankfulness over bitterness and anger, even amid difficult circumsta

For two decades, our escape defined me. It dominated my personality and compelled my every decision. By college, half my life had led up to our escape and the other half was spent reliving it, in churches and retreats where my mother made it a hagiograpihc journey, on college applications where it was a plea, at sleepovers where it was entertainment, and in discussion groups after public viewings of xenophobic melodrama like China Cry and Not Without my Daughter, films about Christian women facing death and escaping to America. Our story was a sacred thread woven into my identity. Sometimes people asked, But don't a lot of Christians live there? or Couldn't your mother just say she was Muslim? It would take me a long time to get over those kinds of questions. They felt like a bad grade, like a criticism of my face and body...Once in an Oklahoma church, a woman said, "Well, I sure do get it. You came for a better life." I thought I'd pass out -- a better life? In Isfahan, we had yellow spray roses, a pool. A glass enclosure shot up through our living room, and inside that was a tree. I had a tree inside my house; I had the papery hand of Morvarid, my friend nanny, a ninety-year-old village woman; I had my grandmother's fruit leather and Hotel Koorosh schnitzels and sour cherries and orchards and a farm - life in Iran was a fairytale. In Oklahoma, we lived in an apartment complex for the destitute and disenfranchised. Life was a big gray parking lot with cigarette butts baking in oil puddles, slick children idling in the beating sun, teachers who couldn't do math. I dedicated my youth and every ounce of my magic to get out of there. A better life? The words lodged in my ear like grit. Gradually, all those retellings felt like pandering. The skeptics drew their conclusions based on details that I had provided them: my childhood dreams of Kit Kats and flawless bananas. My academic ambitions. I thought of how my first retelling was in an asylum office in Italy: how merciless that with the sweat and dust of escape still on our brows, we had to turn our ordeal into a good, persuasive story or risk being sent back. Then, after asylum was secured, we had to relive that story again and again, to earn our place, to calm casual skeptics. Every day of her new life, the refugee is asked to differentiate herself from the opportunist, the economic migrant... Why do the native-born perpetuate this distinction? Why harm the vulnerable with the threat of this stigma? ...To draw a line around a birthright, a privilege. Unlike economic migrants, refugees have no agency; they are no threat. Often, they are so broken, they beg to be remade into the image of the native. As recipients of magnanimity, they can be pitied. But if you are born in the Third World, and you dare to make a move before you are shattered, your dreams are suspicious. You are a carpetbagger, an opportunist, a thief. You are reaching above your station.

You cant find any Shop,factory or school of building human character without rough journey or hard situations college that comes in life as it heppens to me and other people it will come to you too, not that it for some certain people it for everyone. Human character needs to be shaped, prooned or builded for some work that we send to do in living that is other plan of God so you can't escape it as you did'nt escaped to be born the better thing to do is to pray for it process to be done successfully , I know nothing will stand on it cause it God's will but will going to help you to gain strength you need.

Each one of us can only live out of what he feels himself to be, not out of what he thinks and knows in terms of logical, fact-based information. The emotion-based knowledge of one’s ‘self’ and the ‘self-esteem’ that results from it, are formed in childhood. Children come into the world with a unique inner self (a ‘heart’) which, at the time they begin their earthly journey, is undeveloped. The image of a 'seed' I described in the first book illustrates something which needs a lot of care: a lot of input is required in order for that inner self to be developed and for the child to reach his full potential. Sadly, most people never get to discover and live out of their true selves, and as a result, they never see the true selves of their children. Instead — and this is often done with genuine good intentions — they try to make the children conform to their standards and ideas; more often than not, they succeed, and the results are tragic. This is the story of the boy whose cruel father shames him — mocks him as he tries and fails at the exercise the father has asked him to do; this boy abandons all attempts of being physical in any way and hides behind his academic skills. He grows up to be a successful college professor but, able only to live out one aspect of his originally multifaceted self, he goes through life lacking an inner sense of confidence and struggles to ‘feel like a man’; he dislikes any form of physical exercise and develops a number of health issues.

Most of us are caught in the insidious cycle of “waiting to be happy and fulfilled.” “When I am making $300,000 a year I will be happy and fulfilled…”  “When the kids are out of college I will be happy and fulfilled…” “etc. etc., etc…” This is dysfunctional and results in perpetual dissatisfaction and a poorly lived life. Life is not about the destination. It is about the journey. The moment by moment life we create and experience.

I was beginning to think there was no adequate reason for our existence. I realized that so long as the main pursuit of my life boiled down to hedonism that I was more like the hamster on the wheel than I cared to admit. As I watched the people around me chase different things, I realized I wasn’t the only one on a hamster wheel. Many college students think that partying on the weekends and filling their lives with one-night stands is the path towards satisfaction. Many adults think that education, success, luxury, vacationing and wealth are better paths. I had hoped so as well, but they were proving to be just as empty. The harder I ran towards success, the more burnt out I felt.

School was starting to feel like yet another cycle, albeit a constructive one. At first, I told myself, once I get into college, once I get a good job, once I get popular, once I get ripped, or recognized, then I’ll be happy. But after each accomplishment, I only experienced temporary satisfaction. Each time, I would reassess, set higher goals, and work harder, saying, once I meet this goal, then I’ll be happy. Once I get a career in my field, once I find the right woman and make a family, then my life will have meaning. I worked rigorously. When I finally accomplished my goals, I felt proud and excited, but it never lasted long.

His inclusion of milestones as a way to deepen faith and community stood out. He described their importance by saying, “These are life transitions where we name God’s presence. It may be a child beginning college, a relationship beginning or ending, moving to a new home or a new job—we want to help people name God’s presence all along their journeys.” What a hopeful way for our participation in the circle to shape our life beyond the circle.

In the Old Testament, the significance of a blessing is grounded more in the person speaking the blessing than the content of the blessing uttered. So blessings—like prayers—were given differing weight based upon the person speaking them and the context in which they were said. The words “I do” have much more significance when spoken by couples adorned in white dresses and tuxedos than they might with two college students answering “Do you love me?” over a cup of coffee. A person might utter a word of blessing as an everyday greeting or when sending someone off on a good journey, whereas these same words would have had much more gravitas when uttered by the priest over the people gathered before the temple, or a father at the birth of a child.

The great asset of a broad liberal arts education, as I know it, is that it does not have much bearing on any vocation in particular but has great relevance to all vocations in general—provided that the college environment within which it is carried out is accepted as real, as real as any chapter in one’s life, and provided that an explicit effort is made to prepare students to serve and be served by the present society, using the college experience as the working laboratory.

I would like to see the opportunity offered, at both secondary and college levels, for the poor to be prepared to return to their roots and become leaders among the disadvantaged. This suggestion rests upon the belief that the situation of the poor, particularly the neglect of their children, is a national disgrace in our affluent country, and that, if this condition is to be made right, the natural leaders who arise among the disadvantaged will find the way and organize the effort themselves. The best service that a school can render to these people may not be to homogenize them into the upper classes but to help those who have a value orientation that favors it to develop their ability to lead their people to secure a better life for many.

What matters is not how long it takes but the grace of fulfilled dream.

In the spring of 2015, I went to Spain to walk for a week on the Camino de Santiago, the medieval route that has been used for centuries by pilgrims demonstrating their devotion, and now by spiritual seekers looking for renewal. Ever since I studied medieval art in college, walking the Camino had been a dream of mine. I loved the idea of a moderately sized adventure, one that was about walking, not running, and still had the safety of towns and sleeping on mats on the floor instead of inside tents. I set off with underprepared feet, too much in my backpack, thirteen words of Spanish and my copy of Eat Pray Love.

What is my motivation for writing this? I’m tired of seeing so many people struggle. I’m frustrated at seeing so many kids coming out of college without even the basic skills for living a free life for themselves. I’m fed up watching so many parents in a stage of utter exhaustion, wondering what happened to their life after believing that following the rules we were all taught would lead them to success rather than the road to nowhere. I’m sad watching so many of us in our thirties and forties miss out on precious time with our families by drowning in meaningless work, and then finding relief inside a bottle of wine. And I want to prevent those about to embark on this journey to learn from our mistakes and successes.

Major life changes—anything from moving across country to graduating from college New relationships—either in personal or professional work Challenges and difficulties—from sickness to strife to struggle Goals attained and milestones achieved—losing weight, learning a new skill, gaining financial freedom Travel—a visit to a new city or state or country or a journey that brought new insight Spiritual experiences—encounters with grace, growth experiences, new awareness and understanding Special serendipitous blessings—divine encounters that especially encouraged us