“The world owes me a living'--that's passive. 'I owe the world and God a life'--that's active.”

“Spirituality means to me living the ordinary life extraordinarily well. As the old-church father said, 'The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

“He who loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.' That's not really cruel. Loving Christ more than our fathers and mothers simply saves the love we have for our parents from idolatry.... God, as the source of love, is the proper head of every loving household.”

“Love, and you are a success whether or not the world thinks so. The highest purpose of Christianity--which is primarily a way of life, not a system of belief--is to love one another.”

“The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.”

“Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living.”

“Christians have no business thinking that the good life consists mainly in not doing bad things. We have no business thinking that to do evil in this world you have to be a Bengal tiger, when, in fact, it is enough to be a tame tabby—a nice person but not a good one. In short, Pentecost makes it clear that nothing is so fatal to Christianity as indifference. ”