If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep the streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep the 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.’”
Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Everyone wants to do better. Trust them. Leaders are everywhere. Find them. People achieve good things, big and small, every day. Celebrate them. Some people wish things were different. Listen to them. Everybody matters. Show them.
People get caught up in grandeur, forgetting that the best times they ever had in their lives were in tiny spaces with low ceilings and the best things ever said to them were whispered. When I design a house, I start with the site to figure out exactly what elements you want to engage with emotionally and spiritually. Then I consider the communion of people and objects and create containment around them. My consideration is always what it’s going to feel like together. Only lastly do I concern myself with what a house looks like. The only real value of building a house is to increase the territory of your own heart. The only real truth is to create something that will settle your spirit.
We don’t believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.
If we want to live a wholehearted life, we have to become intentional about cultivating rest and play, and we must work to let go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth.
We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink.
…bullshit thrives because we, collectively, have become indifferent to the truth. Fake news thrives because there’s a market for it, willing consumers of bullshit. We believe any claim that suits our purposes. And when we’re confronted by inconvenient facts we treat them suspiciously and dismiss them as fake. Truth has become politicized. We’ll say and believe whatever helps us win.
If you think free speech is assault but assault is free speech you’re a moron of world-historical proportions.
Selfishness is not living your life as you wish. It is asking others to live their lives as you wish.
Transgenderism rests upon a metaphysics of personhood that will attempt to rewrite all of social reality as we know it (case in point: the Department of Defense’s Handbook)…We have now become whoever and whatever we happen to think we are, and the world needs to be remade in a manner that plays to our fantasies.
Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
…both of our major parties are intensely nostalgic and backward looking. The Left wishes it was always 1965, the Right wishes it was always 1981, and they have both decided to just pretend that it is and so to treat every election as a choice about which era to return to. That makes for political debates that are disconnected from reality—they ignore how our country has changed over the decades, and so they ignore both our strengths and our weaknesses and they don’t speak to the problems people actually confront.
It’s not tolerance if you always agree with those you tolerate.
We give them back to thee, dear Lord, who gavest them to us. Yet as thou didst not lose them in giving, so we have not lost them by their return. What thou gavest thou takest not away, O Lover of souls; for what is thine is ours also if we are thine. And life is eternal and love is immortal, and death is only an horizon, and an horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.
