Prayer is essentially about making the heart strong so that fear cannot penetrate there.

Animals love. They love their being. They strive to survive, to celebrate, to propagate . So certainly something we learn from animals is love. To survive and to celebrate, propagate and to love life. To be the best we can be - the right to be here and the responsibility to be the best dog or bear or horse that they can be. Humans have the tendency to self pity that other animals don't indulge in.

We honor life when we work. The type of work is not important: the fact of work is. All work feeds the soul if it is honest and done to the best of our abilities and if it brings joy to others.

The prophets preach . . . that pleasure, not will-power and coercion, is how you most deeply transform people.

Today's Catholic church seems to reward authoritarian personalities who are clearly ill, violent, sexually obsessed and unable to remember the past.

A lot of the time I hate acting. It has a lot to do with the way I was brought up in a world where showing your emotions is frowned upon. It's just not manly. I don't do anything in life because I love doing it. It's because I want to be good at it.

Compassion is not pity ... compassion never considers an object as weak or inferior. Compassion, one might say, works from a strength born of awareness of shared weakness, and not from someone else's weakness. And from the awareness of the mutuality of us all. Thus to put down another as in pity is to put down oneself.