Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world. ... they bring the world into focus, they corral ideas, they hone thoughts, they paint watercolors of perception.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains...

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace.

Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.

Words are such small things, like confetti in the brain, and yet they are color and clarify everything, they can stain the mind or warp the feelings.

The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime's loves.

We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

If you simply love the Universe, the Universe can't help but love you straight back!

Gaiety alone as it were is the hard cash of happiness everything else is just a promissory note.

In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm in the real world all rests on perseverance.

I began to feel that, in a sense, we were all prisoners of our own history.

Science is an excellent piece of furniture to have in the second story, providing that you have common sense on the ground floor.

O God, the creature knows not to what end Thou hast made Him; teach him, and write in the depths of his soul that the clay must suffer itself to be shaped at the will of the potter.

I have found it very important...to let go of my wishes and start hoping.

I haven't had the time to say, 'I'm retiring.' But baseball says, 'You're retired.'

The question is not, how much of what is mine do I give to others. The question is, how much of what is God's do I reserve for myself. The answer we give is a faith issue, a stewardship issue.