Do not steal something that already belongs to you or pine for people who are sitting right next to you.

Your holiest pain comes from your yearning to change yourself in the exact way you'd like the world around you to change.... Your sweet spot is in between the true believers and the scoffing skeptics.

Your drive to produce hard-edged opinions stoked by hostility is likely a sign that you've been brainwashed by the pedestrian influences of pop nihilism.

God was my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat Him. Explain.

We need radical curiosity and reverent pranks, voracious listening and ferocious thanks.

May you eat an unfamiliar dessert in a strange land at least once every three years.

The average American child sees 20,000 murders in TV before reaching age 18. This is considered normal. Every community has video rental stores filled with multimillion-dollar films that depict people doing terrible things to each other. If you read newspapers, you have every right to believe that Bad Nasty Things compose 90 percent of the human experience. But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few novels, films, news stories, and TV shows that dare to depict life as a gift whose purpose is to enrich the human soul.