Don't let anyone or anything rob you of the beauty and meaning at the heart of life. It's your birthright gift.

We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.

Why does a literary scholar study the world of "fiction"? To show us that the facts can never be understood except in communion with the imagination.

Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known.

I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.

Technology is incredibly creative and has great potentials; but it is also very seductive in the way it isolates people, in the way it jazzes people up, in the way it makes junkies out of us - junkies who need a constant stimulation, more information, more bells and whistles, more electronic wonders in order not to be bored.

As a young man, I yearned for the day when, rooted in the experience that comes only with age, I could do my work fearlessly. But today, in my mid-sixties, I realize that I will feel fear from time to time for the rest of my life. I may never get rid of my fear. But . . . I can learn to walk into it and through it whenever it rises up . . . naming the inner force that triggers . . . fear . . . Naming our fears aloud . . . is the first step toward transcending them.