Quotes from Krista Tippett

Depression can kill you. It can also be a spiritually enriching experience. It's really an important part of my theology now and my spirituality that life is not perfect, and I grew up wanting it to be and thinking that if it wasn't, I could make it that way, and I had to acknowledge that I had all kinds of flaws and sadnesses and problems.

Structure is something that calms our nature; we know this of toddlers.

If we cant face our losses, we cant be present either fully to everything that is. When people have cut off or not made peace with some part of themselves, they miss out on other aspects of life.

If God is God, we cant be afraid of what we can learn.

How we carry what has gone wrong for us is essential to being at home in ourselves, and present to the world with all of its failings.

Kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues.

My depression is not something very special. A lot of people go through depression. My divorce is not something very special; a lot of people go through divorce.

Mystery is a birthright of theology and faith, but you often do find religious people grasping for answers that shut things down and narrow what is possible.

Compassion is a spiritual technology.

Humanity needs this technology as much as it needs all other technologies that have now connected us and set before us the terrifying and wondrous possibility of actually becoming one human race.

Silence is an endangered quantity in our time... Silence, embraced, stuns with its presence, its pregnant reality—a reality that does not negate reason and argument, but puts them in their place.

Strong religious identities survive and thrive. But more than ever before, even in their most conservative iterations, they are chosen.

I like to say that I'm tracing the intersection between big ideas and human experience, between theology and real life.

I don't accept the idea that there are two sides to any issue. I think that the middle ground is to be found within most of us.

One of the things I reject in our cultural divisions is the clash between faith and reason, and I would say the same about mystery and intellect. They are somehow mysteriously akin to each other.

You are not going to be perfect every day. It's about turning up the next day and doing it again.

Compassion also brings us into the territory of mystery — encouraging us not just to see beauty, but perhaps also to look for the face of God in the moment of suffering, in the face of a stranger, in the face of the vibrant religious other.

You can disagree with another person's opinions. You can disagree with their doctrines. You can't disagree with their experience.

I can disagree with your opinion, it turns out, but I can't disagree with your experience. And once I have a sense of your experience, you and I are in relationship, acknowledging the complexity in each other's position, listening less guardedly. The difference in our opinions will probably remain intact, but it no longer defines what is possible between us.

For every shrill and violent voice that throws itself in front of microphones and cameras in the name of God, there are countless lives of gentleness and good works who will not. We need to see and hear them, as well, to understand the whole story of religion in our world.

That's very important about stories. They touch something that is human in us and is probably unchanging. Perhaps this is why the important knowledge is passed through stories. It's what holds a culture together. Culture has a story, and every person in it participates in that story. They world is made up of stories; it's not made up of facts.

Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a habit that becomes spiritual muscle memory.

When you admire people, you put them on pedestals. When you love people, you want to be together.

I'm strangely comforted when I hear from scientists that human beings are the most complex creatures we know of in the universe, still, by far. Black holes are in their way explicable; the simplest living being is not. I lean a bit more confidently into the experience that life is so endlessly perplexing. I love that word. Spiritual life is a way of dwelling with perplexity—taking it seriously, searching for its purpose as well as its perils, its beauty as well as its ravages.