“How do you begin? The answer is simple: you decide to.”

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.

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?

You can either practice being right or practice being kind.

I didn’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.

When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility.

I thought I’d begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.

I started my life with Rs 5,000.

It seems wisest to assume the worst from the beginning, and let anything better come as a surprise.

The day you stop learning is the day you begin decaying.

The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.

Begin now what you will be hereafter.

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

As soon as government management begins it upsets the natural equilibrium of industrial relations, and each interference only requires further bureaucratic control until the end is the tyranny of the totalitarian state.