"As soon as we take one thing by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

"We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become."

"None of us know what will happen. Don’t spend time worrying about it. Make the most beautiful thing you can. Try to do that every day. That’s it."

"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words."

"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."

"Any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you, is an idol."

"I'm grateful to be a practicing Christian. I'm always amazed when people say, 'I'm a Christian.' I think, 'Already?' It's an ongoing process. You know, you keep trying. And blowing it and trying and blowing it..."

Example sheds a genial ray
Of light that men are apt to borrow.
So first improve yourself today.
And then improve your friends tomorrow.

"Words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on."

"Be the most ethical, the most responsible, the most authentic you can be with every breath you take, because you are cutting a path into tomorrow that others will follow."

"When you begin to see that your enemy is suffering, that is the beginning of insight."

"Every man's life lies within the present; for the past is spent and done with, and the future is uncertain."

"Anchor the eternity of love in your own soul and embed this planet with its goodness."

"We tend to equate hospitality with parties and social gatherings or gracious resorts and expensive restaurants. To us hospitality is an industry, not a practice, one that summons Martha Stewart to mind more quickly than Jesus Christ. But to ancient Christians hospitality was a virtue, part of the love of neighbor and fundamental to being a person of the way. While contemporary Christians tend to equate morality with sexual ethics, our ancestors defined morality as welcoming the stranger.

Unlike almost every other contested idea in early Christianity, including the nature of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity, the unanimous witness of the ancient fathers and mothers was that hospitality was the primary Christian virtue. From the New Testament texts that unambiguously urge believers to 'practice hospitality' through St. Augustine's works in the fifth century, early Christian writings extol hospitality toward the sick, the poor, travelers, widows, orphans, slaves, prisoners, prostitutes, and the dying."

"You can’t use fiery language to describe a fire. You have to use quiet language so that the fire can be seen."

"We don’t like being bored because boredom is the absence of engaging stimulus, but boredom is valuable because it requires us to fill that absence out of our own resources, which is process of discovery, of doors opening. The pain of boredom is a spur to action, but because it’s pain we’re happy to avoid it. Gadgetry means never having to feel that pain, or that spur. The web expands to fill all boredom. That’s dangerous for everyone, but particularly so for kids, who, without boredom’s spur, may never discover what in themselves or in their surroundings is most deeply engaging to them."

"The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it’s rarer. I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.” The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do."

"[Ideas] come from day dreaming, from drifting, that moment when you’re just sitting there… The trouble with these days is that it’s really hard to get bored. I have 2.4 million people on Twitter who will entertain me at any moment…it’s really hard to get bored. I’m much better at putting my phone away, going for boring walks, actually trying to find the space to get bored in. That’s what I’ve started saying to people who say 'I want to be a writer,' I say ‘great, get bored.'"

"The way to get ideas is to do something boring… They fly into one’s head like birds."

"This much I know: you have to forget your own worries for the sake of others, for the sake of those whom you love."