Sooner or later we will come to the edge of all that we can control and find life, waiting there for us.

Anger is just a demand for change, a passionate wish for things to be different.

The wisdom in the story of the most educated and powerful person is often not greater than the wisdom in the story of a child, and the life of a child can teach us as much as the life of a sage.

The willingness to consider possibility requires a tolerance of uncertainty.

It is said that the Christian mystic Theresa of Avila found difficulty at first in reconciling the vastness of the life of the spirit with the mundane tasks of her Carmelite convent: the washing of pots, the sweeping of floors, the folding of laundry. At some point of grace, the mundane became for her a sort of prayer, a way she could experience her ever-present connection to the divine pattern which is the source of life. She began then to see the face of God in the folded sheets.

The choice people have to make is never between slavery and freedom. We will always have to choose between slavery and the unknown.

How strange to think that great pain may be impermanent. Something in us all seems to want to carve it in granite, as if only this would do full honor to its terrible significance. But even pain is blessed with impermanence... p 259