Poetic

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can't get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

Silence is the soul's invisibility. We can, of course, conceal ourselves behind lies and sophistries, but when we speak, we are present, however careful our disguise.

The center of the self, itself, is this secret, obsessive, often silly, nearly continuous voice — the voice that is the surest sign we are alive.

A cleaner neighborhood begins with your own broom. A more beautiful city begins with a seed in your own garden. A more just society begins in your own heart.

We all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and Earth will have to pause and say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper, who swept his job well.'

Through our scientific genius we have made of this world a neighborhood; now through our moral and spiritual genius we must make of it a brotherhood.

This democracy of ours which sometimes we've treated so lightly, is more than ever a comfortable cloak, so let us not tear it asunder, for no man knows once it is destroyed where or when he will find its protective warmth again.

We must make the dead live. We must make them live in the world's commencement of abiding peace based on justice and charity.

My message comes from millions of women now mostly past and gone. They lived in a single century; they endured, struggled, and suffered, almost unbelievably, in order that you, unborn in their day, might inherit privileges, opportunities and liberties for which they had so prayerfully longed, but were never permitted to know.

Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.