If we put our soul into our work, if, rather than just going through the motions, what we do flows from the deepest part of our being, then after a burst of creativity, we need to replenish our souls.

Our society puts too much emphasis on finding someone who will love you; our culture focuses too much on being loved and not enough on being a loving person.

Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter, so that the world will be at least a little bit different for our having passed through it.

The path to God is rarely a steady climb upward. We climb, we fall back, and we climb higher again.

Good people will do good things, lots of them, because they are good people. They will do bad things because they are human.

We teach children how to measure and how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe.

But at the end, if we are brave enough to love, if we are strong enough to forgive, if we are generous enough to rejoice in another's happiness, and if we are wise enough to know that there is enough love to go around for us all, then we can achieve a fulfillment that no other living creature will ever know, we can reenter paradise.