Real failure comes when we consider ourselves good enough at something to be able to repeat it rather than to develop it. "Success is dangerous," the painter Pablo Picasso said. "One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility."

Life is the ability to start over again.

We punish the body and strip the earth. And we do it in pursuit of a so-called holiness that smacks of the bogus, that denies the gifts of God, that makes us marauders on the earth.

Everything we do seeds the future. No action is an empty one.

Hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside of us to get better. It is about getting better inside about what is going on outside.

Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.

Too many times we insist on loving people the way we want to love them instead of the way they need to be loved.