Never confuse desire with vision. Desire has to do with what we want. Vision has to do with what we need.

Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.

Beware the religion that turns you against another one. It's unlikely that it's really religion at all.

Hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside of us to get better. It is about getting better inside about what is going on outside.

We talk religion in a world that worships the bread but does not distribute it, that practices ritual rather than righteousness, that confesses but does not repent.

Grief is a sign that we loved something more than ourselves. . . . Grief makes us worthy to suffer with the rest of the world.

Compassion makes no distinction between friends and enemies, neighbors and outsiders, compatriots and foreigners. Compassion is the gate to human community.

When souls really touch, it is forever. Then space and time disappear, and all that remains is the consciousness that we are not alone in life.

Compassion is not sympathy. Compassion is mercy. It is a commitment to take responsibility for the suffering of others.

Oppressors do not get to be oppressors in a single sweep. They manage it because little by little, we make them that. We overlook too much in the beginning and wonder why we lost control in the end.

Compassion is the ability to understand how difficult it is for people to be the best of what they want to be at all times.

Each of us needs something of an island in his life—if not an actual island, at least some place, or space in time, in which to be himself, free to cultivate his difference from others.

this song is for the guy who keeps yelling from the balcony, and it's called 'we hate you, please die.

Because things are not agreeable, " said Jean Valjean, "that is no reason for being unjust towards God.

It is very depressing to see that in the 21st century people are still using the same 1950s and '60s style of propaganda.

I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation.

Justice has no independent existence; it results from mutual contracts, and establishes itself wherever there is a mutual engagement to guard against doing or sustaining mutual injury.

I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature.

It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good.

It is difficult to prove yourself reliable when people are required to wait for you.

Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget'st so long / To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?