We get divorce, we get conned, someone we love dies, or we can't find anybody to love us or somebody breaks our heart and we realize this fairy tale ain't fair. So we suffer.
The most powerful moral influence is example.
If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.
After his great awakening, the Buddha continued to meditate and to devote himself to others; otherwise his vision would have receded into a pleasant memory.
I don't want to justify religion in terms of its benefits to us. I believe that, on balance, it does a lot of bad things, too - a tremendous amount. But I don't think that the final justification of religion is the good it does for people. I think the final justification is that it's true, and truth takes priority over consequences. Religion helps us deal with what is most important to the human spirit: values, meaning, purpose, and quality.
We become compassionate not from altruism which denies the self for the sake of the other, but from the insight that sees and feels one is the other.
If human life is to survive on this planet, the old dualistic worldview, with people on one side and the environment on the other, must yield to a new vision that connects us with everything else and leads us to care for and take responsibility for it.
That time of day when the sun hasn’t come up yet, but you can already feel it coming. It’s an elusive warmth, like a subtle promise whispered in your ear and you can go on with your day knowing you’ve been given another chance to get it right.
I'm very, very so-called conservative on the military. I want a very, very strong military. I want to build up - you know, our military is totally depleted. We're going to care of our vets as part of that whole situation because our vets are not taken care of properly.
Truth is a necessary phantom.
I still think of Heaven as a liberal-arts school.