I've consistently said, we need to support charter schools. I think it is important to experiment, by looking at how we can reward excellence in the classroom.

You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Keep exploring. Keep dreaming. Keep asking why. Don’t settle for what you already know. Never stop believing in the power of your ideas, your imagination, your hard work to change the world.

When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk.

Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

Change is never easy, but always possible.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that your efforts don’t matter or that your voice doesn’t count. Don’t ever believe that you can’t make a difference. You have.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up.

Learning to stand in somebody else's shoes, to see through their eyes, that's how peace begins. And it's up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.

If somebody is different from you, that's not something you criticize, that's something that you appreciate.

Love is God. God is love.

Taking care of your thoughts is at least as important as taking care of your body - if not even more important.

A human who learns, and practices the art of love as does divinity, is no longer human.

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

When kings interfere in matters of religion, they enslave instead of protecting it.

You don't solve anything ever, really. You simply state a problem which, when you're lucky, gives you some idea of what possible problems you can - it indicates, you know, your future headaches.

I started to see that my concept of spirituality was totally wrong.

Chivalry is a poor substitute for justice, if one cannot have both. Chivalry is something like the icing on the cake, sweet but not nourishing.

Hesperus bringing together All that the morning star scattered.

To hope is to see with the eye of the heart. To hope is to make the heart captain the vital and the body. To hope is to send darkness-night into exile.