Great Throughts Treasury

"Because it is the best of which we are capable, loving is also supremely exacting, not always but again and again. Love is something we only master in moments. It crosses the chasms between us, and likewise brings them into relief."

"Buddhist mindfulness is about the present, but I also think its about being real. Being awake to everything. Feeling like nothing can hurt you if you can look it straight on."

"Depression can kill you. It can also be a spiritually enriching experience. It's really an important part of my theology now and my spirituality that life is not perfect, and I grew up wanting it to be and thinking that if it wasn't, I could make it that way, and I had to acknowledge that I had all kinds of flaws and sadnesses and problems."

"Compassion is a spiritual technology."

"Compassion also brings us into the territory of mystery - encouraging us not just to see beauty, but perhaps also to look for the face of God in the moment of suffering, in the face of a stranger, in the face of the vibrant religious other."

"Fear usually looks like anger."

"Being intellectually hospitable is a virtue that I bring into the interview space,"

"Compassion is a piece of vocabulary that could change us if we truly let it sink into the standards by which we hold ourselves and others."

"Einstein believed deeply that science should transcend national and ethnic divisions. But he watched physicists and chemists become the purveyors of weapons of mass destruction in the early 20th century."

"For every shrill and violent voice that throws itself in front of microphones and cameras in the name of God, there are countless lives of gentleness and good works who will not. We need to see and hear them, as well, to understand the whole story of religion in our world."

"?Fundamentalism' and 'liberalism' and ?terrorism.' These labels only tell us partial truths. We must use them humbly, guardedly, Niebuhr would say, aware of"

"Humanity needs this technology as much as it needs all other technologies that have now connected us and set before us the terrifying and wondrous possibility of actually becoming one human race."

"I don?t accept the idea that there are two sides to any issue. I think that the middle ground is to be found within most of us."

"How we ask our questions affects the answers we arrive at. Light appears as a wave if you ask it a wavelike question and it appears as a particle if you ask it a particle-like question. This is a template for understanding how contradictory explanations of reality can simultaneously be true."

"How we carry what has gone wrong for us is essential to being at home in ourselves, and present to the world with all of its failings."

"Healing, said the poet, is not a science but the intuitive art of wooing nature."

"I had been a journalist in Europe and then went to divinity school in the early 1990s, and came out as somebody who had the perspective of a journalist and was now also theologically educated."

"If God is God, we can?t be afraid of what we can learn."

"If I?ve learned nothing else, I?ve learned this: a question is a powerful thing, a mighty use of words. Questions elicit answers in their likeness. Answers mirror the questions they rise, or fall, to meet. So while a simple question can be precisely what?s needed to drive to the heart of the matter, it?s hard to meet a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer. It?s hard to transcend a combative question. But it?s hard to resist a generous question. We all have it in us to formulate questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation. There is something redemptive and life-giving about asking better questions."

"If we are stretching to live wiser and not just smarter, we will aspire to learn what love means, how it arises and deepens, how it withers and revives, what it looks like as a private good but also as a common good."

"In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart if poetry"

"Kindness is a most edifying form of instant gratification."

"Intelligence alone does not get us where we need to go or even necessarily where we want to go. For that, the human creature must exercise harder-won capacities of wisdom, and wise action."

"Structure is something that calms our nature; we know this of toddlers."

"Kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues."

"The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are."

"Silence is an endangered quantity in our time... Silence, embraced, stuns with its presence, its pregnant reality?a reality that does not negate reason and argument, but puts them in their place."

"The nuclear family is a recent invention and a death blow to love ? an unprecedented demand on a couple to be everything to each other, the family a tiny echo chamber: history one layer deep. None of the great virtues ? is meant to be carried in isolation."

"This is the opposite of a healing story ? it?s a story that perceives scarcity in the midst of abundance. I have love in my life, many forms of loving. As I settled into singleness, I grew saner, kinder, more generous, more loving in untheatrical everyday ways. I can?t name the day when I suddenly realized that the lack of love in my life was not a reality but a poverty of imagination and a carelessly narrow use of an essential word."

"What a liberating thing to realize that our problems are probably our richest sources for rising to the ultimate virtue of compassion."

"The spiritual energy of our time, as I've come to understand it, is not a rejection of the rational disciplines by which we've ordered our common life for many decades - law, politics, economics, science. It is, rather, a realization that these disciplines have a limited scope. They can't ask ultimate questions...they don't begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in life, what matters in a death, how to love, how we can be of service to each other. These are the kinds of questions religion arose to address and religions? traditions are keepers of conversation across generations about them."

"The things that go wrong for you have a lot of potential to become part of your gift to the world."

"Tolerance is not really a lived virtue; it?s more of a cerebral ascent."

"You are not going to be perfect every day. It?s about turning up the next day and doing it again."

"When my marriage ended, I walked into a parallel universe that had been there all along; I became one of the modern multitudes of walking wounded in the wreckage of long-term love. Strangest of all, on this planet, is the way we continue to idealize romantic love and crave it for completion? After my divorce, I created a welcoming home and took great delight in my children. I cooked dinner for gatherings of friends old and new, invested in beautiful far-flung friendships, and drew vast sustenance from webs of care through the work I do. Yet I told myself, for years, that I had a hole in my life where ?love? should be."

"You can disagree with another person's opinions. You can disagree with their doctrines. You can't disagree with their"