Here in America, religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. They've lost the Axial Age vision of concern for everybody.

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.

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.

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.

Physical features count little unless they are illumined from within.

New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can't be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!

My family and friends and teammates, just having their support has been unbelievable.

This race is not for the swift, but for the smart, for the one who knows himself as the winner

A Christianity without a passion to turn the world upside down is not reflective of apostolic Christianity

Nothing shows one who his friends are like prosperity and ripe fruit.

I don't want to hear music, I don't want the sunrise to be pink. The world is a liar. Its ugliness is overwhelming; the scraps of beauty make it worse.

With some CGI, I think the brain slightly perceives that things aren't real. There's no gravity, the light's not quite real, the shadows aren't quite real.

I would like to run for the mayor of the city of Chicago. That has always been an aspiration of mine even when I was in the House of Representatives.

Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?