Why should I not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside, looking into the shining world?

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.

God created us to be great in our calling

The right relationship won't distract you from God. It will bring you closer to Him.

That boy made me realize, for a while at least, that my parents were wrong, and I didn't have to be like them.

The disastrous invasion of Iraq, something that I strongly opposed, has unraveled the region.

At the heart of science is experimentation. Science doesn't care what you think. What's important is experimenting and actually working stuff out.

Be yourself. If you try to be someone else, it won't work. Whatever you do, you are not going to make everyone happy.

In reality the world is as full of bad mothers as it is of bad fathers, and it is not the motherless children who become delinquent but the fatherless ones.

When I went back to visit my native Berlin after World War II, I noticed that the only thing I really remembered from my childhood Berlin days is the shoe store.

Those things that are the most obvious are the very things we've most likely to overlook.

I do not think there are many among Bishops that will be saved, but many more that perish.