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.

In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart if poetry

A joyful mind is a beautiful mind.

There is less in this than meets the eye.

Is it not gain to have diminished the faith that it was the duty of the wretched and the miserable to be content with the lot in life which providence had awarded them?

Success is not measured by what a man accomplishes, but by the opposition he has encountered and the courage with which he has maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds.

Hillary Clinton follows a cardinal rule in politics - don't commit to a decision before you have to.

There are cases in which somebody has demonstrated just such an outrageous disregard for the bounds of an acceptable decision that you want a measure of accountability.

We are only peripherally tied to the lives of others. It takes a long long time for us to become deeply involved with others, and for some this never happens.

There's two sides to the coin. I think I'm much happier that [Barack] Obama won over John McCain or Mitt Romney, because I think Obama did something culturally for the country.

When Mexico enjoys an economic boom while the U.S. is in dire fiscal straights, it seemed perfectly credible that Mexico would not roll out the welcome mat for unemployed Americans.