Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides.

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.

... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]

Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.

Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it's like they are holding the baby of you.

Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life's work, and try to get hold of a giant panda.

Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.

There are three sides to every story: yours, theirs, and the truth somewhere in the middle.

I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.

When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside world which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.

The only thing that stands between a man and what he wants from life is often merely the will to try it and the faith to believe that it is possible.

The library is every child's lighthouse. It is every person's sanctuary. It is every town and county's fortress in the face of ignorance, intrusion and bad behavior.

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.

There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement that would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts.

Rekindling hope, engaging in inner work, and venturing into the world amount to a complete plan for picking yourself up when you're down.

[Donald Trump] will be the president of the United States.

It is production that creates purchasing power, not the printing press!