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.
“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)
“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)
“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)
“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)
“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)
“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)
“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)
“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)
“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)
“Much of politics and media sends us in the opposite, infantilizing direction. We reduce great questions of meaning and morality to ‘issues’ and simplify them to two sides, allowing pundits and partisans to frame them in irreconcilable extremes. But most of us don’t see the world this way, and it’s not the way the world actually works.”
Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 12)
“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)
“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)
“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)
“History always repeats itself until we honestly and searchingly know ourselves.”
Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 3)
“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)
Book Overview: In Becoming Wise, Krista Tippett has created a master class in living for a fractured world. Fracture, she says, is not the whole story of our time. The enduring question of what it means to be human has become inextricable from the challenge of who we are to one another. She insists on the possibility of personal depth and common life for this century, nurtured by science and “spiritual technologies,” with civility and love as muscular public practice. And, accompanied by a cross-disciplinary dream team of a teaching faculty, she shows us how.
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