Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.

Maybe life doesn't get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we're willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

It's what you do that makes your soul.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

How Gloomy it is, to pause, to cease and to rust unburn, to get used and be indistinct. Like to live is to breathe.

Civilization could not exist until there was written language, because without written language no generation could bequeath to succeeding generations anything but its simpler findings.

The beauty of love is that in giving it away, you are left with more than you had before.

I can do whatever I want.

What shall we do with...the Jews?...I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews.

Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.

If you start to find that kind of luxury as a normal thing, you don't belong in the real world.

I am not a spiritual guy, but all of a sudden I felt the need to really feel things.

Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus...or off the bus.

I think e-mail and social media and all that has made me feel way less isolated than ever before.