Plans made swiftly and intuitively are likely to have flaws. Plans made carefully and comprehensively are sure to.

The fundamental motive of true teaching is the love that seeks and studies and performs.

We pamper the present like a spoiled child, obeying its superficial demands but ignoring its real needs.

The extent to which we live from day to day, from week to week, intent on details and oblivious to larger presences, is a gauge of our impoverishment in time.

At pains to define liberty, that most resolute of indefinables, our minds fall back on spatial images; on birds, sailboats, and mountains; the untethered balloon, the blue sky, the nude figure.

That morning I experienced vividly, if almost subliminally, the reality of change itself: how it fools our sentinels and undermines our defenses, how careful we are to look for it in the wrong places, how it does not reveal itself until it is beyond redress, how vainly we search for it around us and find too late that is has occurred within us.

The reason so many promises are not kept is the same as the reason they are made in the first place.