If God is God, we cant be afraid of what we can learn.

Intelligence alone does not get us where we need to go or even necessarily where we want to go. For that, the human creature must exercise harder-won capacities of wisdom, and wise action.

Compassion is a piece of vocabulary that could change us if we truly let it sink into the standards to which we hold ourselves and others.

The things that go wrong for you have a lot of potential to become part of your gift to the world.

You are not going to be perfect every day. It’s about turning up the next day and doing it again.

Silence is an endangered quantity in our time... Silence, embraced, stuns with its presence, its pregnant reality—a reality that does not negate reason and argument, but puts them in their place.

I dont accept the idea that there are two sides to any issue. I think that the middle ground is to be found within most of us.

You can disagree with another person's opinions. You can disagree with their doctrines. You can't disagree with their experience.

What a liberating thing to realize that our problems are probably our richest sources for rising to the ultimate virtue of compassion.

Compassion is a spiritual technology.

How we carry what has gone wrong for us is essential to being at home in ourselves, and present to the world with all of its failings.

Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.

One man's Mona Lisa is another man's velvet Elvis.

Early in my songwriting career, when I was learning a lot about writing songs, I'd force myself to sit down until I came up with something.

Falsehood is often rocked by truth, but she soon outgrows her cradle and discards her nurse.

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.

He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line.

words can never get at the truth.

Grace is like a lake of drinkable water right outside your door. But you stay inside and die of thirst.

Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.

Looking forward with an eternal perspective gives one hope, a reason to look up and feel gratitude for even the smallest bit of light.