A scholar is committed to building on knowledge that others have gathered, correcting it, confirming it, enlarging it.

Community doesn't just create abundance - community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed.

How easily we get trapped in that which is not essential - in looking good, winning at competition, gathering power and wealth - when simply being alive is the gift beyond measure.

In classical understanding, education is the attempt to "lead out" from within the self a core of wisdom that has the power to resist falsehood and live in the light of truth, not by external norms but by reasoned and reflective self-determination. The inward teacher is the living core of our lives that is addressed and evoked by any education worthy of the name.

I like to say that before we can create an external space in which to receive people, we have to create an internal space in which to receive them.

Every good teacher and every good parent has somehow learned to negotiate the paradox of freedom and discipline. We want our children and our students to become people who think and live freely, yet at the same time we know that helping them become free requires us to restrict their freedom in certain situations.

When you are with young people, it is almost inconceivable that things wouldn't arise that you'd have to respond to, such as someone wrestling on the bus. And how you handle that, how you respond to that, how you deal with that is a lesson to the people you are on the bus with.