But even labeling a site as astronomical is an improvement, since it partially sidesteps the old stereotype of Indians being primitive and ignorant savages.
Royalty has always been an unconscious but all-consuming goal of the European immigrant.
I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.
The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
Love measures our stature: the more we love, the bigger we are. There is no smaller package in all the world than that of a man all wrapped up in himself.
Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without.
The cause of violence is not ignorance. It is self-interest. Only reverance can restrain violence – reverance for human life and the environment.
Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.
Christ came to take away our sins, not our minds.
There is nothing anti-intellectual in the leap of faith, for faith is not believing without proof but trusting without reservation.
In our time all it takes for evil to flourish is for a few good men to be a little wrong and have a great deal of power, and for the vast majority of their fellow citizens to remain indifferent.
Human beings who blind themselves to human need make themselves less human.
The temptation to moralize is strong; it is emotionally satisfying to have enemies rather than problems, to seek out culprits rather than the flaws in the system.
To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.
The one true freedom in life is to come to terms with death, and as early as possible, for death is an event that embraces all our lives. And the only way to have a good death is to lead a good life. The more we do God’s will, the less unfinished business we leave behind when we die.
A spiritual person tries less to be godly than to be deeply human.
There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The bad ones are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover’s quarrel with their country, a reflection of God’s lover’s quarrel with all the world.
Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living.
I asked an 85 year old professor, ‘What makes you cry?’ He said, ‘Whenever I see or hear the truth.’
If your heart is full of fear, you won’t seek truth; you’ll seek security. If a heart is full of love, it will have a limbering effect on the mind.