The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.

We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.

The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.

The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.

What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.

As you get up in the morning, as you make decisions, as you spend money, make friends, make commitments, you are creating a piece of art called your life.

When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.

The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.

Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool.

Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

Completion comes when we not just wake up from all form, from all identification, but when love causes us to re-embrace it all.

The idea of a bowed and terrified liberal minority during McCarthy's 'reign of terror' is poppycock. Then as now, all elite opinion was against McCarthy.

A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

The cure for the Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner tragedies is not education or exposure. It's the Gospel. So, finally, I'M ENCOURAGED because the Gospel gives mankind hope.

Years teach us more than books.

I hope you're not smoking in front of her,' Lucia says to him. 'Yeah, I lie in bed and puff in her face, Lucia,' he says, irritated.

The soul has been given its own ears to hear things mind does not understand.

Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.

We have got to encourage other nations also to come along with us with the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that.