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

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.

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.