How we carry what has gone wrong for us is essential to being at home in ourselves, and present to the world with all of its failings.

Intelligence alone does not get us where we need to go or even necessarily where we want to go. For that, the human creature must exercise harder-won capacities of wisdom, and wise action.

Compassion is a piece of vocabulary that could change us if we truly let it sink into the standards to which we hold ourselves and others.

The things that go wrong for you have a lot of potential to become part of your gift to the world.

You are not going to be perfect every day. It’s about turning up the next day and doing it again.

Silence is an endangered quantity in our time... Silence, embraced, stuns with its presence, its pregnant reality—a reality that does not negate reason and argument, but puts them in their place.

I dont accept the idea that there are two sides to any issue. I think that the middle ground is to be found within most of us.

You can disagree with another person's opinions. You can disagree with their doctrines. You can't disagree with their experience.

What a liberating thing to realize that our problems are probably our richest sources for rising to the ultimate virtue of compassion.

Compassion is a spiritual technology.

In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart if poetry

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

With the Smithies, it was different. There was sometimes no telling where one of them began and the others left off.

There is no cancer, no sickness, no sin, no reversal of fortunes, no curse, no heartache - nothing - that's greater than Jesus. Jesus heals. Jesus restores. Jesus brings life.

Now that I think about it, this might all have been inevitable. The reason we all ended up here, the reason I couldn't leave her alone...it all had to be a ridiculous fairy tale.

Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

It's very difficult to do street casting with girls, because a beautiful girl in real life won't necessarily have the silhouette or the presence needed for a show.

Laughter is wholesome. God is not so dull as some people make out. Did not He make the kitten to chase its tail.

My belief is that most people are conservative. They just haven't been asked yet.

The great majority of women are more intelligent, better educated, and far more moral than multitudes of men whose right to vote no man questions.