The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.

The morning glories and the sunflowers turn naturally toward the light, but we have to be taught, it seems.

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it to those around us.

We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

The journey to happiness involves finding the courage to go down into ourselves and take responsibility for what's there: all of it.

Religion is one of the safest places to hide from God.

The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.

God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes.

Maturity is the ability to joyfully live in an imperfect world.

There is nothing to prove and nothing to protect. I am who I am and it's enough.

You come to God not by being strong, but by being weak; not by being right, but through your mistakes.

Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.

I envy not in any moods The captive void of noble rage, The linnet born within the cage, That never knew the summer woods.

I should have worried about taking responsibilities for which I was not ready.

If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct us in their application.

The past doesn't buy you much.

The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure.

Education must start from birth.

Love gives beauty to everything it touches.

And I think because there is an essence of me that cares about other people and what other people think then that then makes me seem very sweet and polite.

Simply cutting the taxes for America's wealthiest families is clearly not creating the needed new jobs, and that strategy is unlikely to succeed in the future.