“Transformation begins in you, wherever you are, whatever has happened, however you are suffering. Transformation is always possible.”

The path of joy was connection and the path of sorrow was separation.

Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone’s back.

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream to find out why they’re falling in.

A person is a person through other persons; you can’t be human in isolation; you are human only in relationships.

If you are setting out to be joyful you are not going to end up being joyful. You’re going to find yourself turned in on yourself. It’s like a flower. You open, you blossom, really because of other people.

Much depends on your attitude. If you are filled with negative judgment and anger, then you will feel separate from other people. You will feel lonely.

Forgiving is not forgetting; its actually remembering–remembering and not using your right to hit back. Its a second chance for a new beginning. And the remembering part is particularly important. Especially if you dont want to repeat what happened.

In the end generosity is the best way of becoming more, more, and more joyful.

To protect our children, we must talk to them about rape.

A very important but difficult piece of renewing relationships is accepting responsibility for our part in any conflict.

We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are. A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family.

If you want to keep people subjugated, the last thing you place in their hands is a Bible. There’s nothing more radical, nothing more revolutionary, nothing more subversive against injustice and oppression than the Bible.

Forgiveness is truly the grace by which we enable another person to get up, and get up with dignity, to begin anew.

I wish I could shut up, but I can’t, and I won’t.

We must be ready to learn from one another, not claiming that we alone possess all truth and that somehow we have a corner on God.

We are not responsible for what breaks us, but we can be responsible for what puts us back together again. Naming the hurt is how we begin to repair our broken parts.

The two limits of every unit of thinking are a perplexed, troubled, or confused situation at the beginning, and a cleared up, unified, resolved situation at the close.

Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.

It’s only after you’ve stepped outside your comfort zone that you begin to change, grow, and transform.

A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man.

All human cognition begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to conceptions, and ends with ideas.

Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

When I spoke of “beauty”, I was thinking of Rilke’s notion that the beautiful is nothing but the beginning of the terrible, and of Hölderlin’s idea that the beautiful can unite extreme opposites in intimacy.