Each of the world religions has its own particular genius, its own special insight into the nature and requirements of compassion, and has something unique to teach us.

It's a great event to get outside and enjoy nature. I find it very exciting no matter how many times I see bald eagles.

Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.

Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing good and being compassionate.

I like silence; I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.

Compassion is not an option. It's the key to our survival.

Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity.

Religion isn’t about believing things. It's ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.

I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions.

Surely it's better to love others, however messy and imperfect the involvement, than to allow one's capacity for love to harden.

The hajj is one of the five essential practices of Islam; when they make the pilgrimage to Mecca, Muslims ritually act out the central principles of their faith.

Humor and paradox are often the only ways to respond to life's sorrow with grace.

Identifying body language changes connected with the conversation in hand gives us insights into their thoughts and emotions.

We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.

I think there's a lot you can learn from everybody; everybody has a story and a strength within them.

When the history of civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.

When you're a writer, you have to write these stories, even if you don't get paid

You can't get what you want all the time in life.

Treat people the way they are and they will stay that way. Treat people the way they can become and they will become that way.

It is one of Miss Manners's great discoveries that one needn't contradict others in order to set them straight.

It is a common observation, that the more solicitous any people are about dress, the more effeminate they are.