Great Throughts Treasury

"Hope is a stance, not an assessment."

"We won't believe the world can change until we experience ourselves changing. There's only one way to change yourself: risk... We have to risk being wrong, and we have to risk being lonely."

"My whole mission in life is to help us find the power we lack to create the world we want."

"Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully."

"I've grown certain that the root of all fear is that we've been forced to deny who we are."

"Every aspect of our lives is, in a sense, a vote for the kind of world we want to live in."

"Hope is not what we find in evidence, it's what we become in action."

"I'm neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I am a dyed-in-the-wool possibilist! By this, I mean with an eco-mind, we see that everything's connected and change is the only constant. From there, something shifts for me. I can see that we're all actually co-creating our future moment to moment - which feels like endless possibility."

"Hope is not wishful thinking. It's not a temperament we're born with. It is a stance toward life that we can choose...not not. The real question for me, though, is whether m hope is effective, whether it produces or is just where I hide to ease my own pain."

"For me hope isn't wishful thinking or blind faith about the future. It's a stance toward life - one of curiosity and humility."

"Recent breakthroughs in science show we have just the capacities we need to face our planet's challenges. We're "soft-wired" for cooperation, empathy, fairness, along with a deep need to "make a dent," as social philosopher Erich Fromm put it. My hunch is that one reason depression is a global pandemic is that the dominant mental map denies so many of us expression of these deep needs and capacities."

"The act of putting into your mouth what the earth has grown is perhaps your most direct interaction with the earth."

"The real cause of hunger is the powerlessness of the poor to gain access to the resources they need to feed themselves."

"This is a choice point for the country,"

"We can all reprogram our brain's responses by putting ourselves into new, initially uncomfortable situations. We'll learn fear might not mean 'stop'; I've come to believe fear usually means 'go."

"Luxury as beauty has nothing to do with a particular place or an object's price tag. It is seeing with eyes for beauty. Once we cut the automatic but learned connection between buying stuff and pleasure, we can actively cultivate new connections - a sense of freedom as we shed draining habits and discover new pleasures in seeing and creating beauty all around us."

"We couldn't enjoy the freedom of driving if there weren't rules of the road, or of eating, if there weren't food safety rules. Really, every sort of human activity - from bed-making to baseball-playing - involves rules. We can also celebrate that, unlike many human-made rules open to endless debate, nature offers us non-arbitrary, infallible guidelines. Could we see that certainty not as a restriction, but as a relief? And we can ask, what rules do people love? Those that make sense to us because we can see how they serve us, and those we feel respect us because the rule-makers are listening to us."

"We'll learn fear might not mean 'stop'; personally, I've come to believe fear usually means 'go.' It always means listen closely"

"With an eco-mind, we get ready for surprises, for we realize it's just not possible to know what's possible."

"When after many battles past, Both tir'd with blows, make peace at last, What is it, after all, the people get? Why! taxes, widows, wooden legs, and debt."

"You see schools questioning feeding children high-fat and processed foods,"