If you think there's an important difference between being a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu or a Muslim or a Buddhist, then you're making a division between your heart, what you love with, and the way you act in the world.

It's such a foolish thing to argue about names, when what we're doing is all one thing.

I like to walk around my neighborhood, late in the afternoon. I sometimes wind up at the wonderful, old Shell station that's been changed into a coffee shop. Right where Johnny used to change my oil, I have a latte and take out my little book bag. It doesn't sound very austere.

I think we all have a core that's ecstatic, that knows and that looks up in wonder. We all know that there are marvelous moments of eternity that just happen. We know them.

If you teach three university courses a day, you need something to turn your mind off.

Longing becomes more poignant if in the distance you can't tell whether your friend is going away or coming back. The pushing away pulls you in.

What I deeply want... is for Rumi to become vitally present for readers, part of what John Keats called our soul-making, that process that is both collective and uniquely individual, that happens outside time and space and inside, that is the ocean we all inhabit and each singular droplet-self.