We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.

I grew up in the South [USA states] under segregation. I know what terrorism feels like - when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn't look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. That's terrorism, too.

Love likes to extend itself. If you receive it in a book - or however you get it - then your duty is to extend it beyond.

Anything that forces you to act at the possible harm of your own existence is going to exact a cost. You have to then think about, "Can I pay this? What will this mean to me - to my relationships, to my family, to everybody? What is this going to take? How much of me is this going to take?"

Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don't even recognize that growth is happening...Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.

People who work hard often work too hard. ... May we learn to honor the hammock, the siesta, the nap and the pause in all its forms.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.