To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.

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.

It is the community that suffers when it refuses to validate any outside standards, and won't allow even the legitimate exercise of authority by the professionals it has hired.

He who is the most slow in making a promise is the most faithful in the performance of it.

We often do to people what people are very comfortable with doing to animals without a second thought.

Everybody can digest milk when they're little.

My favorite drawings at the Muhammad cartoon festival in Texas were the two chalk outlines out front.

When you meditate deeply, you will see beyond life and death. You will see that you can't die and you can't be reborn. You are existence itself.

Brookfield High School. How may I direct your call? No, sir, this is not a waste- disposal unit, I'm afraid you have the wrong number.

What I want any genre to do, what I want any work of art to do, is to illuminate the human condition.

The violence at the end is about personal torture.

The past can be a rudder that guides you or an anchor tha hinders you. Leave your mistakes with God and look to the future by faith.