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.

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.

We are defined by how we place our attention.

Not much is known about alligators. They don't train well. And they're unwieldy and rowdy to work with in laboratories.

Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do

What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death.

the biggest threat to the religious experience may well come from organized religion itself.