“Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the wrong. Sometime in life you will have been all of these.”

“There comes a time in everyone’s life—and I do mean in everyone’s life—when you ask yourself what it is that you’ve been doing with your life. Sometimes you even realize that whatever you’ve been doing all your life, you’ve been doing it wrong. Dead wrong… Son, you want that realization to hit you when you’re 70? Or 50? Or when you’re still young, with your whole life still ahead of you?”

“I think the mirror should be tilted slightly upward when it's reflecting life--toward the cheerful, the tender, the compassionate, the brave, the funny, the encouraging, all those things.”

“When you finally give up striving, you will be left with what you have been striving for.”

“At a certain age [...] you start thinking you might have learned something when you were young if you hadn't already been so smart.”

“Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.”