“You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don’t think your way into becoming yourself.”

And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.

A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn’t protect itself and it doesn’t hide. It stands out, like a baby’s fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through.

A good marriage is where both people feel like they’re getting the better end of the deal.

Your inside person doesn’t age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you’ve ever been.

I don’t remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don’t even know exist until you love a child.

Laughter is carbonated holiness.

The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be.

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

I don’t know much, but I understand how entirely doomed I am without God.

Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don’t make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.

Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.

The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.

The reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day.

We are not here to see through one another, but to see one another through.

The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

Courage is feeling fear, not getting rid of fear, and taking action in the face of fear.

What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?

Doubt can only be removed by action.

To have what you have never had, you have to do what you have never done.

Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.

Everything you want is out there waiting for you to ask. Everything you want also wants you. But you have to take action to get it.

Thinking and feeling that have to do with action in association with others is as much a social mode of behavior as is the most overt cooperative or hostile act.