There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay.

it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

I don't ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.

Education is the means to end, not the end itself. Education should not become another status quo, or silo, or the end.

I will never have greater respect than for the man that realizes he was wrong and graciously admits it without a single excuse.

Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others.

But Nightshirts aren't dangerous," Pippi assured her. "They don't bite anybody except in self defense.

Let's build us a happy, little cloud that floats around the sky.

I want to get better. That's the only way to progress. So I'm just young having fun making music.

Behold, this has touched your lips; and your iniquity is taken away, and your sin is forgiven.

On the flat tax, the more you compress the tax rates, the more you untax where the income is really made, at the top of the pyramid.

There's usually a rhythm and a melody in my head, and that creates an emotional state