“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.

Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.

The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.

Monotony and repetition are characteristic of many parts of life, but these do not become sources of conscious discomfort until novelty and entertainment are built up as positive experiences.

Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool.

The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.

When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.

The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.

What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.

A suprising number of physicians manage to continue to care about persons even after the rigors of medical training.

In many ways, constancy is an illusion.

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.

Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.

Caring can be learned by all human beings, can be worked into the design of every life, meeting an individual need as well as a pervasive need in society.

No one is afraid of heights, they’re afraid of falling down. No one is afraid of saying I love you, they’re afraid of the answer.

Glory be and praise to God. I didn’t do any of this. God did. I don’t have a recipe or a blueprint. I prayed for it, and my prayers are continuing to be answered.

We have no right to express an opinion until we know all of the answers.

I really believe Jesus’s forgiveness is the answer to our shame and our feelings of helplessness.

Don’t assume that the answers are out there in the form of somebody else already doing something. Sometimes they are. But you have to think beyond that.

I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.

There are no easy answers’ but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.

Within the covers of the Bible are the answers for all the problems men face.