“The Christian tradition was passed on to me as a great rich mixture, a bouillabaisse of human imagination and wonder brewed from the richness of individual lives.”

Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food.

Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.

A disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.

Solutions to problems often depend upon how they’re defined.

The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.

As we age we have not only to readdress earlier developmental crises but also somehow to find the way to three affirmations that may seem to conflict. … We have to affirm our own life. We have to affirm our own death. And we have to affirm love, both given and received.

Jazz exemplifies artistic activity that is at once individual and communal, performance that is both repetitive and innovative, each participant sometimes providing background support and sometimes flying free.

The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.

Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.

Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.

Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.

Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.

Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.

Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.

We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.

Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving.

Demand is best measured in terms of spending. You know, I think in traditional economics, it’s a mistake to measure it in terms of the quantity of goods.

I enjoy doing different kinds of things. I just enjoy being not tied too much. I feel that I’m tied to myself as a kind of traditional musician and a singer, and the history that I have ties me down.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

Campaign promises are – by long democratic tradition – the least binding form of human commitment.

From the point of view of the meditative traditions the entire society is suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

That’s a traditional Samoan dance. I was lucky that I was able to fly my cousins, who are professional dancers, up from Hawaii and they were able to be in the movie with me. We had a great time.

Science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.

They won’t listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don’t want the truth; they want their traditions.