To love righteousness is to make it grow, not to avenge it. Throughout his life on earth, Jesus resisted every impulse to work more rapidly for a lower good.

It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.

A man's real belief is that which he lives by. What a man believes is the thing he does, not the thing he thinks.

Never tell a child 'you have a soul.' Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body.

If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give.

Forgiveness unleashes joy. It brings peace. It washes the slate clean. It sets all the highest values of love in motion.

Any faith in Him, however small, is better than any belief about Him, however great.

No man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear.

To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.

It is by loving and not by being loved that one can come nearest to the soul of another.

How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.

...it's not the stories - it's the pain and the joy and the people who stay with you long after the stories are told ...

In passing, we should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.

In the mid-1960s, as hard to believe as it may be now, choosing to go into academic philosophy was not an imprudent career choice. There were lots of academic jobs in philosophy then.

Maybe language is kind, giving us these double meanings. Maybe it's trying to teach us a lesson, that we can always be two things at once.

From an early age I knew I would be unhappy if I wasn't doing something creative.

Playing somebody who's obsessed. Playing somebody who is transgressing, and who is really crossing moral lines and ethical lines. That's always interesting.

People more think of me as a party animal. Which, I am a self-proclaimed party animal, but I'm also the hardest working person you'll ever know.

Research the imagination. It was as obsolete as the appendix in most adults, except for those in whom, like the appendix, it became inflamed for no reason.

Screwing business as usual fundamentally recognises that doing good is good for business.

Unfortunately civility is hard to codify or legislate, but you know it when you see it. It's possible to disagree without being disagreeable.