[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)

You have to get into the water and learn against what seems to be the law gravity to float and dancing, or athletics takes you years before you develop a skill. But if you work at it, practicing daily, you can enable your body to do things that are utterly impossible to an untrained physic.

Religions don't own compassion; it is a human virtue.

My study of religion, which I regard in many ways as an art form, is a search for meaning.

Nirvana is something within you. It is not an external reality. No god thunders down from the mountaintop. Just as the great mystics in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths all discovered, God is within the self. God is virtually inseparable from ourselves.

My greatest solace is my study. If I am deprived of my study, I can become lost, unhappy and unhinged.

We constantly have ideas and experiences that go beyond what we can say or know. Most often these are expressed in art, in painting, in music. Music, everyday confronts us with a form of knowing that doesn't depend on words.