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)
“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)
“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 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)
“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)
“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)
“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)
“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)
“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)
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)
“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)
“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)
“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)
“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)