32 Krista Tippett Quotes from Becoming Wise For A Deeper, More Nourishing Life

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Excerpt: Filled to the brim with insight, these quotes from Becoming Wise explore the mystery and art of living for a more distilled, clear life.

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Introduction: Inquiring Into Life’s Meaning

Created as an inquiry into the mystery and art of living (notably not a resolution or declaration into living), Becoming Wise is an enriching book that is filled to the brim with exploratory insight. All of which adds up to a wonderfully thought-provoking book that will impress upon your thinking ways you might live a deeper, more nourishing life.

Author Krista Tippett—Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, National Humanities Medalist, and NPR host of On Being—does this by sharing conversations she has had with some of the most extraordinary voices throughout her years of interviewing. Each exploring some of the great questions of meaning of our time.

The list I have created for you below isolates some of those key insights into short, digestible bites to ignite your appetite and kick-start your thinking. Split into four sections (click to jump): (1) Quotes on love and connection; (2) Quotes on change; (3) Quotes on spirituality/ traveling within; (4) Quotes on becoming wise—I encourage you to take your time and digest these bites slowly. These distillations can be quite powerful and shouldn’t be wasted with rash reading. Enjoy! ~ Matt

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Quotes from Becoming Wise on Love and Connection

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“The question of what it means to be human is now inextricable from the question of who we are to each other.”

Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 2)

“People who have turned the world on its axis across history have called humanity to love. It’s time to dare this more bravely in our midst, and dare learning together how love can be practical, creative, and sustained as a social good, not merely a private good.”

Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 10)

“Love is the superstar virtue of virtues, and the most watered down word in the English language.”

Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 104)

“Love is something we only master in moments.”

Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 68)

“We find fulfillment where we choose to find our fulfillment. And if you’re told you can only find it here and you don’t look at where it is, which is your life, you keep thinking it’s coming. Oh, it’ll be here one day. I’ll get the big love. Well, you have the big love. It’s already here.”

Eve Ensler, via Becoming Wise (Page 145)

“I come to understand that for most of my life, when I was looking for love, I was looking to be loved. In this, I am a prism of my world. I am a novice at love in all its fullness, a beginner.”

Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 108)

“My heart cannot be educated by myself. It can only come out of a relationship with others. And if we accept being educated by others, to let them explain to us what happens to them, and to let yourself be immersed in their world so that they can get into our world, then you begin to share something very deep.”

Xavier Le Pichon, via Becoming Wise (Page 143)

“You can’t dominate people without separating them from each other and from themselves. The more people get plugged back into their bodies, into each other, the more impossible it will be for us to be dominated and occupied. I think that’s really the work right now, and I don’t mean that in a narcissistic way. I mean, how in our daily lives are we connecting in every single respect with ourselves and everything around us? Because that’s where transcendence comes from. That’s where real energetic transformation comes from.”

Eve Ensler, via Becoming Wise (Page 97)

“There’s a reason why, when my son who’s six is crying, he needs a hug. It’s not just that he needs my love. He needs a boundary around his experience. He needs to know that the pain is contained and can be housed and it won’t be limiting his whole being. He gets a hug and he drops into his body.”

Matthew Stanford, via Becoming Wise (Page 68)

“The person who’s in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community everywhere they go.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, via Becoming Wise (Page 224)

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Quotes from Becoming Wise on Change

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“The ‘news’ is defined as the extraordinary events of the day, but it is most often translated as the extraordinarily terrible events of the day. And in an immersive 24/7 news cycle, we internalize the deluge of bad news as the norm—the real truth of who we are and what we’re up against as a species.”

Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 4)

“It’s hard to make good news sexy. It is. I think about this a lot as a journalist. But maybe it’s like kindness. Kindness is the stuff of moments, but it can be absolutely transformative in moments. Beautiful lives are transformative in moments. But we have to train ourselves to look for them.”

Sylvia Boorstein, via Becoming Wise (Page 222)

“There are very strong words of Martin Luther King. His question was always, how is it that one group—the white group—can despise another group, which is the black group. And will it always be like this? Will we always be having an elite condemning or pushing down others that they consider not worthy? And he says something I find extremely beautiful and strong, that we will continue to despise people until we have recognized, loved, and accepted what is despicable in ourselves. There are some elements despicable in ourselves, which we don’t want to look at, but which are part of our natures. We are mortal.”

Jean Vanier, via Becoming Wise (Page 83)

“I’ve always felt that one of the things that we do badly in our educational process, especially working with so-called marginalized young people, is that we educate them to figure out how quickly they can get out of the darkness and get into some much more pleasant situation. When what is needed, again and again, are more and more people who will stand in that darkness, who will not run away from those deeply hurt communities, and will open up possibilities that other people can’t see in any other way except through human beings who care about them.”

Vincent Harding, via Becoming Wise (Page 235)

“The way to set moral change in motion, [Anthony Appiah] says, is not to go for the jugular, or even for dialogue—straight to the things that divide you. Talk about sports. Talk about the weather. Talk about your children. Make a human connection. Change comes about in part, as he describes it, by way of ‘conversation in the old-fashioned sense’—simple association, habits of coexistence, seeking familiarity around mundane human qualities of who we are.”

Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 135)

“Our world is abundant with quiet, hidden lives of beauty and courage and goodness. There are millions of people at any given moment, young and old, giving themselves over to service, risking hope, and all the while ennobling us all. To take such goodness in and let it matter—to let it define our take on reality as much as headlines of violence—is a choice we can make to live by the light in the darkness.”

Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 265)

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Quotes from Becoming Wise on Spirituality / Traveling Within

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“History always repeats itself until we honestly and searchingly know ourselves.”

Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 3)

“I’ve been really lucky to see many, many places. Now, the great adventure is the inner world, now that I’ve spent a lot of time gathering emotions, impressions, and experiences. Now, I just want to sit still for years on end, really, charting that inner landscape because I think anybody who travels knows that you’re not really doing so in order to move around—you’re traveling in order to be moved. And really what you’re seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you’re sleepwalking through your daily life.”

Pico Iyer, via Becoming Wise (Page 196)

Men go forth to wonder at the heights of mountains,
the huge waves of the sea,
the broad flow of the rivers,
the vast compass of the ocean,
the courses of the stars,
and they pass by themselves without wondering.

Saint Augustine, via Becoming Wise (Page 163)

“In yoga, the transitions between postures are a measure of grace as much as the postures themselves. I find myself applying this physical experience in minute ways in the more cerebral course of my working days.”

Matthew Stanford, via Becoming Wise (Page 72)

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“Spiritual humility is not about getting small, not about debasing oneself, but about approaching everything and everyone else with a readiness to see goodness and to be surprised. This is the humility of a child, which Jesus lauded. It is the humility of the scientist and the mystic. It has a lightness of step, not a heaviness of heart.”

Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 266)

“Spirituality doesn’t look like sitting down and meditating. Spirituality looks like folding the towels in a sweet way and talking kindly to the people in the family even though you’ve had a long day. People often say to me, ‘I have so many things that take up my day. I don’t have time to take up a spiritual practice.’ And the thing is, being a wise parent or a spiritual parent doesn’t take extra time. It’s enfolded into the act of parenting.”

Sylvia Boorstein, via Becoming Wise (Page 223)

“This really is my life’s work, to go where there is suffering. I suppose, like us all, I’m learning how to deal with the suffering of the world inside myself… to deal with my own pain and most importantly to still have the ability to be proactive.”

Kayla Mueller, via Becoming Wise (Page 263)

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Quotes on Becoming Wise

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“I have seen that wisdom emerges precisely through those moments when we have to hold seemingly opposing realities in a creative tension and interplay: power and frailty, birth and death, pain and hope, beauty and brokenness, mystery and conviction, calm and buoyancy, mine and yours.”

Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 266)

“I’d say, ‘But I’m not happy.’ And [my grandmother] would say, ‘Where is it written that you’re supposed to be happy all the time?’ And I actually think it was the beginning of my spiritual practice—that life is difficult. Then 40 years later, I learned that the buddhists said the same thing, that life is inevitably challenging and how are we going to do it in a way that’s wise and doesn’t complicate it more than it is just by itself?”

Sylvia Boorstein, via Becoming Wise (Page 218)

“We now know that doing good to others, having a network of strong and supportive relationships, and having a sense that one’s life is worthwhile are the three greatest determinants of happiness.”

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, via Becoming Wise (Page 192)

“Our bodies tell us the truth of life that our minds can deny: that we are in any moment as much about softness as fortitude. Always in need of care and tenderness. Life is fluid, evanescent, evolving in every cell, in every breath. Never perfect. To be alive is by definition messy, always leaning towards disorder and surprise. How we open or close to the reality that we never arrive at safe enduring stasis is the matter, the raw material, of wisdom.”

Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 67)

“The core of life is about losses and deaths both subtle and catastrophic, over and over again, and also about loving and rising again. The cancer, the car accident—these are extreme experiences of other trajectories we’re on—aging, the loss of love, the death of dreams, the child leaving home. Grief and gladness, sickness and health, are not separate passages. They’re entwined and grow from and through each other, planting us, if we’ll let them, more profoundly in our bodies in all their flaws and their grace.”

Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 68)

“All art holds the knowledge that we’re both living and dying at the same time. It can hold it. And thank God it can, because nothing out in the corporate world is going to shine that back to us, but art holds it.”

Marie Howe, via Becoming Wise (Page 148)

“If I’ve learned nothing else, I’ve learned this: a question is a powerful thing, a mighty use of words. Questions elicit answers in their likeness. Answers mirror the questions they rise, or fall, to meet. So while a simple question can be precisely what’s needed to drive to the heart of the matter, it’s hard to meet a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer. It’s hard to transcend a combative question. But it’s hard to resist a generous question. We all have it in us to formulate questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation. There is something redemptive and life-giving about asking a better question.”

Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 29)

“I take it as an elemental truth of life that words matter. This is so plain that we can ignore it a thousand times a day. The words we use shape how we understand ourselves, how we interpret the world, how we treat others. From Genesis to the aboriginal songlines of Australia, human beings have forever perceived that naming brings the essence of things into being. The ancient rabbis understood books, texts, the very letters of certain words as living, breathing entities. Words make worlds.”

Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 15)

“What we practice, we become. What’s true of playing the piano or throwing a ball also holds for our capacity to move through the world mindlessly and destructively or generously and gracefully. I’ve come to think of virtues and rituals as spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, time and space.”

Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 9)

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If you enjoyed these quotes from Becoming Wise, you should consider reading Krista Tippett’s book in full. It comes highly recommended:

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