Don't let anyone or anything rob you of the beauty and meaning at the heart of life. It's your birthright gift.

Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.

Community is a place where the connections felt in our hearts make themselves known in the bonds between people, and where the tuggings and pullings of those bonds keep opening our hearts.

I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.

One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person's pain without trying to "fix" it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person's mystery and misery.

We are here not only to transform the world but also to be transformed.

Self-care is never a selfish act - it is only good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer others.

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.

Community doesn't just create abundance - community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed.

At its deepest level, I think teaching is about bringing people into communion with each other, with yourself as the teacher, and with the subject you are teaching.

Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.

In a war of truth and lie, lie retreats always with shame and pity.

Even when I work with computers, with high technology, I always try to put in the touch of the hand.

All diseases run into one, old age.

What if when they called a war, no one went?

My own best books have not been published. In fact, they've not even been written yet.

To search for wisdom apart from Christ means not simply foolhardiness but utter insanity.

We have all in some degree become anarchistic.

People always go on about sleaze, but I think it's only a small part of what I write about.

[On being asked how it felt to be the first female conductor of the Boston Symphony:] I've been a woman for a little more than fifty years, and I've gotten over my original astonishment.

My experience is that lots of people go to church, sing the songs, tell the story, etc but have profound ambivalence about God.