“The most important thing on Earth is for all of us to make this sentence true: Compassion is what people do.”

I think that in order to parent effectively, we are going to have to admit two things: We can’t keep our children safe. We can’t accept the fact that we can’t keep our children safe.

Sometimes when you love someone like a mother loves her child, that love can turn into fear. It happens to me all the time. I am so afraid that the world will not be kind to my children.

The closer you get to people who are different than you, the more you learn that we’re all same.

Making sensible family rules around cell phones and driving is a way to love yourself, your marriage, your children, and the world well.

I’ve never believed in or understood romantic love. Love at first sight was always a complete joke to me.

When we shrug and say we don’t care, it’s usually a lie. Every girl cares. We’ve just been taught not to expose ourselves by showing it. What the world needs now is girls and women who aren’t afraid to care – who are done saying, ‘Whatever.’

I don’t think that I’m broken at all. I no longer think that I’m a mess. I just think I’m a deeply feeling person in a messy world.

You do not have to agree with me to love me.

We can be shiny and perfect and admired, or we can be real and honest and vulnerable and loved. But we actually do have to choose.

I used to choose friends based on similarity in age and life stage, but I’ve learned that those were the wrong criteria. Trying to live life exclusively alongside others our own age is like attempting to climb Mt. Everest without a Sherpa. It’s a little dangerous.

Parenting is the most important thing to many of us, and so it’s also the place we’re most vulnerable. We’re all a little afraid we’re doing it wrong.

If no pain, then no love. If no darkness, no light. If no risk, then no reward. It’s all or nothing. In this damn world, it’s all or nothing.

Do not measure your marriage by how much love you feel today: measure it by how much love you’ve offered today.

A safe life includes following your dreams with the full knowledge that doing so is not, in any way, shape or form, safe in the traditional meaning of the word. Because living safely means dying without too many regrets. That is safe.

If you’re not okay, you might as well not pretend you are, especially since life has a way of holding us down until we utter that magic word: help! That’s when angels rush to your side.

Habits are learned. And children learn their habits by watching what we do, not by listening to what we say. So we have to stop talking and teaching and preaching and just go do.

The purpose of the journey is compassion. When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion.

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.

The underlying issues, the psychological motives, in all my movies have been the same, he said. Personal responsibility and friendship, the importance of a compassionate life as opposed to a passionate life.

An enemy to whom you show kindness becomes your friend.

Volunteers are the only human beings on the face of the earth who reflect this nation’s compassion, unselfish caring, patience, and just plain love for one another.

All human beings are limbs of the same body. God created them from the same essence. If one part of the body suffers pain, then the whole body is affected. If you are indifferent to this pain, you cannot be called a human being.

Now is the time to understand That all your ideas of right and wrong Were just a child’s training wheels to be laid aside When you finally live With veracity And love.

It is much easier to show compassion to animals. They are never wicked.