The greatest tragedy is to live out someone else's life thinking it was your own.

What if the world is holding its breath - waiting for you to take the place that only you can fill?

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.

The antidote to exhaustion isn't rest. It's wholeheartedness.

Gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.

To have a firm persuasion in our work - to feel that what we do is right for ourselves and good for the world at exactly the same time - is one of the great triumphs of human existence.

Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you.

Our work is to make ourselves visible in the world. This is the soul's individual journey, and the soul would much rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else's.

Enough. These few words are enough If not these few words, this breath If not this breath, this sitting here This opening to the life we have refused again and again Until now Until now.

I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living falling toward the center of your longing.

The courageous conversation is the one you don't want to have.

There are three critical ingredients to democratic renewal and progressive change in America: good public policy, grassroots organizing and electoral politics.

Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.

Filibuster has long tradition, but used to harm civil rights.

All too infrequently do I encounter a new voice as delightful, compelling, and intelligent as that of Molly Tanzer.

How are his poems?" "He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.

Our job is going to be to hold Donald Trump and the Republican majority accountable.

Vice incapacitates a man from all public duty; it withers the powers of his under- standing, and makes his mind paralytic.

Compliments you pay to yourself aren't worth having.

The best advice I ever came across on the subject of concentration is: Wherever you are, be there.

Those who are right do not argue. Those who argue are not right.