Quotes from Krista Tippett

It's not about healing the world by making a huge difference. It's about healing the world that touches you, that's around you.

More riveting to me in the end than the politics of Berlin was the vast social experiment its division had become... 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 knew what we were against. We just didn't know what we were for.

By being what only I can be, I give humanity what only I can give. It is my uniqueness that allows me to contribute something unique to the universal heritage of humankind. I sum up the Jewish imperative, very simply—and it has been like this since the days of Abraham: to be true to your faith is a blessing to others regardless of their faith. That's the big paradox when you really reach the very depth of particularity.

I don't know why it is, how it is, but it's the authentic, the unique, the different that makes us feel enriched when we encounter it. And a bland, plastic, synthetic, universal can't-tell-one-brand-of-coffee-from-another-brand-of-coffee by contrast makes life flat, uninteresting, and essentially uncreative.

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. That lightness is the surest litmus test I know for recognizing wisdom when you see it in the world or feel its stirrings in yourself.

the question isn't whether we're going to have to do hard, awful things, because we are. We all are. The question is whether we have to do them alone.

Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a practice that becomes spiritual muscle memory. It's a renewable resource for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be.

The mystery and art of living are as grand as the sweep of a lifetime and the lifetime of a species. And they are as close as beginning, quietly, to mine whatever grace and beauty, whatever healing and attentiveness, are possible in this moment and the next and the next one after that.

Resilience is a successor to mere progress, a companion to sustainability.

W. H. Auden, "We must love one another or die." That is, I think, where we are at the beginning of the 21st century. And since we really can love one another, I have a great deal of hope.

And it is in the whole educational system, that we must educate people to become capable and to take their place in society. That has value, obviously. But it's not quite the same thing as to educate people to relate, to listen, to help people to become themselves.

Race, john powell says, is like gravity, experienced by all, understood by few.

But our world is abundant with beauty and courage and grace. I'm aware of a growing aspiration to attend, with all the tools we have at hand, to the human change that makes social change possible. The digital world, though a new Wild West in many ways, is on some basic level simply another screen on which we project the excesses and possibilities of life in flesh and blood.

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.

there are "near enemies" to every great virtue—reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path.

I'm consciously shedding the assumption that a skeptical point of view is the most intellectually credible. Intellect does not function in opposition to mystery; tolerance is not more pragmatic than love; and cynicism is not more reasonable than hope. Unlike almost every worthwhile thing in life, cynicism is easy. It's

I started my research just very coincidentally six months before 9/11. Over the course of the last 12 years, I have seen fear absolutely run roughshod over our families.

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.

Internet is in its infancy. It is at a fundamental level a new canvas for the old human condition, salvation and sin, at digital speed and with viral replication. It is a magnifying glass on every human inclination, beautiful and terrible, trivial and mean, generous and curious. Take note of how this realization puts the power back with us.

Sometimes one wise voice that has been in the world for a while and evolved, lived the same human drama from a few different angles, can provide more nuance than any two-sided debate.

Wonderment in the face of the other is also so beautifully exacting a progression from mere tolerance.

This is antiseptic language, which puts our human dramas in political and economic boxes and holds us at arm's length from the heart of the matter. Still, I feel more and more of us willingly seeing, choosing to care about the heart of the matter, holding the question of love,

Our spiritual lives are where we reckon head-on with the mystery of ourselves, and the mystery of each other.