As Rome burns, I refuse to be a fiddler and insist on being a fireman. Grab a bucket, won't you? Join me in rushing to the calamity. Let's do what we can.
Words you never want to hear the dentist say to his assistant while he's in your mouth: "Get me the saw." Yeah. It's from personal experience.
Lesson from the dental chair: Almost nothing is quite as bad as it seems, or as good. So stay calm.
My job is to respect and nurture Truth, Beauty, Goodness and Unity—cultivating the intellectual, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual sides of life. And, yeah, it’s your job, too.
Justice is everybody's business, in the small details of life. Fairness. Kindness. Evenhandedness. And then mercy can take its proper place.
When we lose sight of the best in us, we tend to manifest the worse in us. That's a key to personal life, and to national politics as well.
Every difficulty, every challenge, every disappointment tells me something about myself, and provides me an opportunity for transformation.
Nothing's really ours. Everything's given to us for a time. We're stewards meant to care for all the outer and inner blessings of life, and share them.
How hard is it to listen? Just listen. Really listen. Quietly. Attentively. Compassionately. Imaginatively. As an act of love. Courageously.
We can't overstate the power of humility in life, to be like the humus, the soil of the earth, open and ready to grow what you're given.
When we seek to love more than to be loved, to appreciate more than to be appreciated, to encourage more than to be encouraged, we get it.
In times of high emotion and deep division, we're to love our neighbors as ourselves, and even our "enemies" - valuing their true good.
Too many people live lives of illusion. And that's a great tragedy of the human condition. Refuse illusion. Seek truth. Have courage.
Plato's insistence: Never let appearances blind you to realities. And that may be one of the hardest tasks in life.
Aristotle's formula for the highest human good was simple: People in Partnership for a shared Purpose. There's nothing solitary about it.
Never let adversarial thinking be your baseline or default mode of thought, outside the bounds of a real battle with bullets and bombs.
Dreams are the engine of achievement. But the gas in the tank is hard work.
