Quotes from Krista Tippett

Our charge is not to 'save the world' after all," (activist Courtney Martin)'s written. "It is to live in it, flawed and fierce, loving and humble.

Poetry is language that speaks to our hearts. And I'm using the biblical word heart. I think the closest equivalent to that in 21st-century language is our imaginations. The heart, in biblical physiology, is the center of our emotions, but also of our intellect. Those two things cannot be separated. And poetic language is precise. It is detailed, it's realistic, but it is not the discursive language of mere fact.

We watch our technologies becoming more intelligent, and speculate imaginatively about their potential to become conscious. All the while, we have it in us to become wise.

There are places in human experience that politics cannot analyze or address, and they hold more possibility for change than we can begin to imagine.

At the right temperatures, geologic faults allow for movement, ductility, flow. Earthquakes happen when weaknesses cannot be expressed. "And communities which are rigid, which do not take into account the weak points of the community—people who are in difficulty—tend to be communities that do not evolve. When they do evolve, it's generally by a very strong commotion, a revolution.

Here are some words I love, words that describe presence rather than means towards an end: nourishing, edifying, redemptive; courageous, generous, winsome; adventurous, curious, tender.

Well, when I say "poetry is not all love, love, love," I mean romantic love is where we go first with the word. But really there is so much more to the word. The word is sober. The word is grave. The word is not just about something light and happy and pleasurable. The word calls up deep, deep responsibilities.

justice makes charity less necessary

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.

Hope is an orientation, an insistence on wresting wisdom and joy from the endlessly fickle fabric of space and time.

Healing," said the poet, "is not a science but the intuitive art of wooing nature.

This realization unsettled my sense of personal progress and education: it was possible to have freedom and plenty in the West and craft an empty life; it was possible to "have nothing" in the East and create a life of intimacy and dignity and beauty.

We chose too small a word in the decade of my birth—tolerance—to make the world we want to live in now. We opened to the racial difference that had been there all along, separate but equal, and to a new infusion of religions, ethnicities, and values. But tolerance doesn't welcome. It allows, endures, indulges. In the medical lexicon, it is about the limits of thriving in an unfavorable environment.

Listening is about being present, not just about being quiet. I meet others with the life I've lived, not just with my questions.

Really feeling your body move and the life inside of yourself is critical. Western culture is astoundingly disembodied and uniquely so.

The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are.

Resilience) acknowledges from the outset that things will go wrong. All of our solutions will eventually outlive their usefulness. We will make messes, and disruption we do not cause or predict will land on us. This is the drama of being alive.

Lonely is one of the adjectives people like Shane Claiborne use, alongside unsustainable, to describe the culture of adulthood they grew up watching.

I learned to be wary that summer of a pious approach to life that saw good intentions and righteous prayer as substitutes for planning and pragmatic action.

we will continue to despise people until we have recognized, loved, and accepted what is despicable in ourselves.

Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." In

But what we did is we studied our town. We did an inventory of all of the things that were present there—farms and marshes and springs and historic sites, Indian trails, buildings, our tobacco farms included. And what happened after we did this very careful and very extensive inventory is, we fell in love with the place. Most of us didn't know where we lived. We had just moved in and out rather oblivious to the beauty of things.

Maybe this is another way to think about original sin—the ingrained lure of the possibility of going numb, a habit of acquiescence to it.

We are among the first peoples in human history who do not broadly inherit religious identity as a given, a matter of kin and tribe, like hair color and hometown. But the very fluidity of this—the possibility of choice that arises, the ability to craft and discern one's own spiritual bearings—is not leading to the decline of spiritual life but its revival.