Krista Tippett Quotations

Depression can kill you. It can also be a spiritually enriching experience. It's really an important part of my theology now and my spirituality that life is not perfect, and I grew up wanting it to be and thinking that if it wasn't, I could make it that way, and I had to acknowledge that I had all kinds of flaws and sadnesses and problems.

Intelligence alone does not get us where we need to go or even necessarily where we want to go. For that, the human creature must exercise harder-won capacities of wisdom, and wise action.

Kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues.

Buddhist mindfulness is about the present, but I also think its about being real. Being awake to everything. Feeling like nothing can hurt you if you can look it straight on.

What a liberating thing to realize that our problems are probably our richest sources for rising to the ultimate virtue of compassion.

Being intellectually hospitable is a virtue that I bring into the interview space,

I like to say that I'm tracing the intersection between big ideas and human experience, between theology and real life.

I make no apologies for the fact that I have a religious life of my own. I'm speaking as a Christian because I'm speaking as myself.

If we can't face our losses, we can't be present either fully to everything that is. When people have cut off or not made peace with some part of themselves, they miss out on other aspects of life.

My depression is not something very special. A lot of people go through depression. My divorce is not something very special; a lot of people go through divorce.

I don't accept the idea that there are two sides to any issue. I think that the middle ground is to be found within most of us.

Tolerance is not really a lived virtue; it’s more of a cerebral ascent.

You are not going to be perfect every day. It’s about turning up the next day and doing it again.

For many people who were never religious or who leave the religion of their childhood behind, it's the experience of having children of your own that brings an urgency to the question of what you believe.

Mystery is a birthright of theology and faith, but you often do find religious people grasping for answers that shut things down and narrow what is possible.

Structure is something that calms our nature; we know this of toddlers.

Strong religious identities survive and thrive. But more than ever before, even in their most conservative iterations, they are chosen.

One of the things I reject in our cultural divisions is the clash between faith and reason, and I would say the same about mystery and intellect. They are somehow mysteriously akin to each other.

If God is God, we cant be afraid of what we can learn.

I had been a journalist in Europe and then went to divinity school in the early 1990s, and came out as somebody who had the perspective of a journalist and was now also theologically educated.

If we cant face our losses, we cant be present either fully to everything that is. When people have cut off or not made peace with some part of themselves, they miss out on other aspects of life.

Einstein believed deeply that science should transcend national and ethnic divisions. But he watched physicists and chemists become the purveyors of weapons of mass destruction in the early 20th century.

Fear usually looks like anger.

Humanity needs this technology as much as it needs all other technologies that have now connected us and set before us the terrifying and wondrous possibility of actually becoming one human race.

[Kindness] is a most edifying form of instant gratification.

I dont accept the idea that there are two sides to any issue. I think that the middle ground is to be found within most of us.

In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart if poetry

How we carry what has gone wrong for us is essential to being at home in ourselves, and present to the world with all of its failings.

Silence is an endangered quantity in our time... Silence, embraced, stuns with its presence, its pregnant reality—a reality that does not negate reason and argument, but puts them in their place.

Compassion is a spiritual technology.

You can disagree with another person's opinions. You can disagree with their doctrines. You can't disagree with their experience.

For every shrill and violent voice that throws itself in front of microphones and cameras in the name of God, there are countless lives of gentleness and good works who will not. We need to see and hear them, as well, to understand the whole story of religion in our world.

The things that go wrong for you have a lot of potential to become part of your gift to the world.

Compassion also brings us into the territory of mystery - encouraging us not just to see beauty, but perhaps also to look for the face of God in the moment of suffering, in the face of a stranger, in the face of the vibrant religious other.

Compassion is a piece of vocabulary that could change us if we truly let it sink into the standards by which we hold ourselves and others.