I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains...

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.

Words are such small things, like confetti in the brain, and yet they are color and clarify everything, they can stain the mind or warp the feelings.

The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime's loves.

We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.

Some of the most beautiful things worth having in your life come wrapped in a crown of thorns.

Men can be teenagers until well into their twenties. That is well known

You shouldn't call then anything. They're poor unfortunate people who cannot help the way they look,

The only people who would be in government are those who care more about people than they do about power.

I want John Legend to sing at my wedding.

I can remember loving to recruit. I knew I was going to do my best. But traveling and recruiting doesn't appeal to me any more. It's not as much fun as it used to be.

To be loved, we have to love ourselves. Only when we love ourselves do we have enough love to give away. By giving love we then receive love.

If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.

The Jesuits had learned that a Christian mission to China could never succeed if it were not in a position to show and convince the Chinese intelligentsia of the superiority of the European culture.

We can have whatever it is we choose, I don't care how big it is. You become what you think about, but you also attract what you think about most.