“Manners, really good ones, make it possible to live with almost anyone, gracefully and pleasantly.”

Somehow, we have to get older people back close to growing children if we are to restore a sense of community, acquire knowledge of the past, and provide a sense of the future.

Through a grandmother’s voice and hands the end of life is known at the beginning.

There is no lonelier person than the one who lives with a spouse with whom he or she cannot communicate.

Don’t depend on governments or corporations to fix problems. Social revolutions are led by passionate individuals and that’s what makes the difference.

The way in which each human infant is transformed into the finished adult, into the complicated individual version of his city and his century is one of the most fascinating studies open to the curious minded.

One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary. to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

You can never have a relationship with someone whose smell you don’t like.

We grow up never questioning that which is unquestioned around us.

Where we choose to put our attention changes our brain, which in time can change how we see and interact with the world.

An education not founded on Art will never succeed.

The most intractable problem today is not pollution or technology or war; but the lack of belief that the future is very much in the hands of the individual.

To demand that another love what one loves is tyranny enough, but to demand that another hate what one hates, is even worse.

If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one’s subject matter.

Human beings seem to hold on more tenaciously to a cultural identity that is learned through suffering than to one that has been acquired through pleasure and delight.

If you have a story of grace, then you have a story of grace to tell.

Not going to give casual worship to a God of extravagant beauty and grace!

The spirituality of wonder knows the world is charged with grace, that while sin and war, disease and death are terribly real, God’s loving presence and power in our midst are even more real.

Grace means undeserved kindness. It is the gift of God to man the moment he sees he is unworthy of God’s favor.

Pride is the oldest and most common of sins. Humility is the rarest and most beautiful of graces.

Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner’s manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.

But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.

In God’s garden of grace, even broken trees bear fruit…