We come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.

What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.

To really love a person completely is to come to a point where your stories are intertwined.

A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls.

In a way, human beings have never been part of the natural order; we're not biological in the normal sense. Normal biological animals stop eating when they're not hungry and stop breeding when there is no sense in breeding. By contrast, human beings are what I think of as "biomythic" animals: we're controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order. For a long time, our unnatural beahvior didn't threaten the natural world, but now it does.

The Greeks invented the idea of nemesis to show how any single virtue, stubbornly maintained gradually changes into a destructive vice. Our success, our industry, our habit of work have produced our economic nemesis. Work made modern men great, but now threatens to usurp our souls, to inundate the earth in things and trash, to destroy our capacity to love and wonder.

We suffer from the illusion that the faster we run, the more likely we are to grasp happiness. The truth is that the velocity necessary for success rarely exceeds the rate of reflection.