How can families harm us when they love us? Very easily, unfortunately. Most of us overlook one important fact when we think love is enough: Love and respect aren't the same thing. Love is fusion. As a baby, you belong to your parents, your extension of them. Respect is differentiation: you belong to yourself, and you're an extension of no one. Differentiation is essential for happiness of adults.

— Barbara Sher

In the rush of daily living it's easy to forget all the remarkable people real or fictional who have been a part of your life. But if you just imagine they are near for a moment you will realize that anyone who ever touched your heart is always with you patiently waiting to emanate warmth and support whenever you remember to think of them.

— Barbara Sher

Let’s end the notion that ideas have no value unless they turn into a business or have some other practical use. Save them all in a beautiful book like Leonardo did. You might want to give them away someday, perhaps to someone who needs an idea. Or your great-great-grandchildren might love knowing what a fascinating mind you had. Or your biographer might be very happy after you’re gone.

— Barbara Sher

"Now" is the operative word. Everything you put in your way is just a method of putting off the hour when you could actually be doing your dream.

— Barbara Sher

Resentment is weak and lowers your self-esteem.

— Barbara Sher

Since then, I’ve come to believe you don’t always have to use things you love, and it’s not always so practical to be so practical. Now that I’ve grown up, I realize that all that delicious dilettantism pays its way as much as any degree in medicine or engineering, by making me remember every day—whenever I pick up a book or watch the Science Channel or try to read a map of Asia for no particular reason—that life is amazing and there is no end to the wonder of it.

— Barbara Sher

Start small. Start now. Start everything. And don’t bother to finish any of it.

— Barbara Sher

The amount of good luck coming your way depends on your willingness to act.

— Barbara Sher

The cure for sorrow is to learn something.

— Barbara Sher

The defense force inside of us wants us to be cautious to stay away from anything as intense as a new kind of action. Its job is to protect us and it categorically avoids anything resembling danger. But it's often wrong.

— Barbara Sher