Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are.

Religion is the call to confront reality; to master the self.

What is sickness? What is health? Both are distractions. Put them both aside and go forward.

Built into human makeup is a longing for a 'more' that the world of everyday experience cannot requite.

I am profoundly moved and persuaded by the near-death experience.

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

When historians look back on our century, they may remember it most, not for space travel or the release of nuclear energy, but as the time when the peoples of the world first came to take one another seriously.