You will find peace not by trying to escape your problems, but by confronting them courageously. You will find peace not in denial, but in victory.

Confronting a stadium audience, you can't see the whites of their eyes. It's just an amorphous mass of noise and, of course, you can't see the alleged billions watching at home either, so the degree to which you are intimidated is quite low.

If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.

Valor' is a word we don't commonly hear. People can show courage and bravery confronting many different challenges in life. But 'valor' connotes willingly putting oneself in mortal danger to protect others.

The anniversary of the tragic attacks on September 11, 2001, and September 11, 2012, is a day to remember those who died and suffered. It is also an opportunity to open a new dialogue on the tactics and strategies that have been successful - and unsuccessful - in confronting, containing, and defeating the threat from radical Islam.

...I started to realize how many great things could happen by confronting the things that scare you most.

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death-- ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.

But walking causes absorption. Walking interminably, taking in through your pores the height of the mountains when you are confronting them at length, breathing in the shape of the hills for hours at a time during a slow descent. The body becomes steeped in the earth it treads. And thus, gradually, it stops being in the landscape: it becomes the landscape. That doesn't have to mean dissolution, as if the walker were fading away to become a mere inflection, a footnote. It's more a flashing moment: sudden flame, time catching fire. And here, the feeling of eternity is all at once that vibration between presences. Eternity, here, in a spark.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.

You will find peace not by trying to escape your problems but by confronting them courageously. You will find peace not in denial but in victory.

Confronting a stadium audience you can't see the whites of their eyes. It's just an amorphous mass of noise and of course you can't see the alleged billions watching at home either so the degree to which you are intimidated is quite low.

I have deep respect for people's individual faith but when faith gets connected to the machinery of state or the machinery of hate I find it very confronting.

If we are to survive we must have ideas vision and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.