Pain is a teacher from whom we can learn much.

I wanted to play music from the age of seven. I suddenly fell in love with it and that's what I was going to do, or to be involved with music. It was just speaking to me at a level that as a seven year old I suddenly realized the world was capable of supporting in my head a lot more than what I was understanding verbally and visually.

There is no such thing as a peace of soul approach to religion. It makes of God a gigantic Bayer Aspirin; take God three times a day and you won't feel any pain.

There is no fixed, true and real person inside of you or me, precisely because being a person necessarily implies becoming a person, being in process.

When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.

Life is something like a remarkable, exciting puzzle. It comes piece by piece in packages marked days.

A life of love is difficult, but it is not a bleak or unrewarding life. In fact, it is the only true human and happy life, for it is filled with concerns that are as deep as life, as wide as the whole world, and as far reaching as eternity. It is only when we have consented to love, and have agreed to forget ourselves, that we can find our fulfillment. This fulfillment will come unperceived and mysterious like the grace of God, but we will recognize it and it will be recognized in us.