The Three "A's"...

Two quotes that I think go together quite well and which, between them, cover what is, as far as I can tell, the marrow --  acceptance, awareness and action: 

“We are all much more simply human than otherwise, be we happy and successful, contented and detached, miserable and mentally disordered, or whatever.”

-- The late American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan.

"To choose compassion and consolation, requires a measure of obstinacy, a muscular and brutish willfulness that is also an authentic kind of grace."

-- A.O. Scott, New York Times film critic on the movie, War Horse.