Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.

To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence, hollering, 'What's it for?'

You may never have proof of your importance but you are more important than you think. There are always those who couldn’t do without you. The rub is that you don’t always know who.

The myth of the impossible dream is more powerful than all the facts of history.

Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there at the sandpile at Sunday School.

The world does not need tourists who ride by in a bus clucking their tongues. The world as it is needs those who will love it enough to change it, with what they have, where they are.

It's just this: that there are places we all come from-deep-rooty-common places- that makes us who we are. And we disdain them or treat them lightly at our peril. We turn our backs on them at the risk of self-contempt. There is a sense in which we need to go home again-and can go home again. Not to recover home, no. But to sanctify memory.