We each should have 2 pockets: in 1 the message, 'I am dust & ashes;' in the other, 'For me the universe was made.'

Religious life is not going to go away. It will take a different form. Why am I so sure it's not going to go away? Because there are people whose personalities and gifts, and interests and soul, are simply immersed in living this kind of a spiritual lifestyle. That only makes sense. If you can live an artistic lifestyle, why can't somebody live a spiritual lifestyle? We've always, in every single great tradition, had a percentage of the population that stands in the middle of us being the beacon that calls us to realize that the spiritual life is an essential part of every life.

Oppressors do not get to be oppressors in a single sweep. They manage it because little by little, we make them that. We overlook too much in the beginning and wonder why we lost control in the end.

I have to be honest with you, it never occurred to me, as years went by, that my country would look like this as I grew into it, and as it grew into a different world. That's why I keep pressing the notion that we must seek wisdom.

"When we do not know what harbor we are making for," the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, "no wind is the right wind." Persons have vision only when they have a dream that drives them on.

Compassion makes no distinction between friends and enemies, neighbors and outsiders, compatriots and foreigners. Compassion is the gate to human community.

It is a pathetic moment in the history of the human condition when the outside world tells us who and what we are - and we start to believe it ourselves. Then, bent over from the weight of the negativity, we start to wither on the outside.