“You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.”

Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

Prayer is not what is done by us, but rather what is done by the Holy Spirit in us.

I often wonder if my knowledge about God has not become my greatest stumbling block to my knowledge of God.

Spiritual maturity is not knowing what to do with your whole life, but just knowing what to do next.

Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.

If I were to let my life be taken over by what is urgent, I might very well never get around to what is essential.

Your heart is greater than your wounds.

What makes us human is not our mind but our heart, not our ability to think but our ability to love.

Keep a space where God can let something totally new take place.

Your life is not going to be easy, and it should not be easy. It ought to be hard. It ought to be radical; it ought to be restless; it ought to lead you to places you’d rather not go.

The only feelings that do not heal are the ones you hide.

Compassion can never coexist with judgement because judgement creates the distance, the distinction, which prevents us from really being with the other.

You have to listen to the one who calls you beloved. That has to be affirmed over and over again. That is prayer – listening to the voice of the one who calls you “the beloved.”

Our life is a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment.

Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the Beloved.

Life is just a little opportunity for you during a few years to say, “I love you, too.”

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. The only function of a school is to make self-education easier; failing that, it does nothing.

Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.

Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason.

Whatever is underneath all the drag, it actually doesn’t really matter. It kind of just matters, are you a great entertainer? And are you nice to work with? Are you good at your job?

Christianity is the strangest religion ever set up, for it committed a murder upon Jesus in order to redeem mankind from the sin of eating an apple.

I love being around people who work with their hands, who do the hard things to keep our country going. They’re just my kind of people.

It is dangerous and unbelievably fast and entirely different from the kind of track I am used to racing on.

My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.