Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity.

Prayer is looking out from a different set of eyes, which are not comparing, competing, judging, labeling or analyzing, but receiving the moment in its present wholeness and unwholeness. That is what is meant by contemplation.

Famine, poverty, abuse, you can't keep that all blocked out. If you let those things teach you, influence you, change you, those are the events that transition you without you even knowing it to become more compassionate.

When you do the first half of life well, you have a good sense of yourself.

The Gospel gives human suffering deep, personal, and cosmic meaning, by connecting our pain to the pain of others and, finally, by connecting us to the very "pain of God".

You have to find some way to not become a cynical or negative person, a person who keeps walking around and opening your eyes in the outside world but inside you close down, a person who stops expecting tomorrow to be better than today.

Men must learn how to grieve, or they are inevitably angry or controlling, and they don't even know why.