Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words or in exact and priggish argument.

It is a masterpiece of the devil to make us believe that children cannot understand religion. Would Christ have made a child the standard of faith if He had known that it was not capable of understanding His words?

In other words a person who is fanatic in matters of religion and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe becomes a person who has no faith at all.

Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: 'Ye must have faith.'

Think twice before you speak because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

Music and language are a vital element. We as actors and directors offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.

I have a mess in my head sometimes and there's something very satisfying about putting it into words. Certainly it's not something that you're in charge of necessarily but writing about it putting it into your words can be a very powerful experience.

When a novel has 200 000 words then it is possible for the reader to experience 200 000 delights and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again perhaps more intensely.

America is an idea. And it's the solemn responsibility of each 'temporary' president to protect and nurture that noblest of all ideas - with integrity. This man Mitt Romney has shown - not through his experience but through his actions and words - that he is unqualified to carry out that responsibility.

No matter how close to personal experience a story might be inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and actually whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.

Words are capable of making experience more vivid and also of organizing it. They can scare us and they can comfort us.

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience because words make experience last.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience ultimately one must have one's experiences in common.

In a society in which equality is a fact not merely a word words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.

Republicans many times can't get the words 'equality of opportunity' out of their mouths. Their lips do not form that way.

After all sustainability means running the global environment - Earth Inc. - like a corporation: with depreciation amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words keeping the asset whole rather than undermining your natural capital.

Listen if the mayor wants to have a debate about education in this city I got three words: bring it on.

Competitiveness is really what it costs you per man-hour to get you what you want. In other words there's an education level that plays into the mix and so if it's inexpensive to buy an hour of real good education in places like China versus the U.S. that factors in.

A lot of children like I did move away from words because of the fear - which is something you have to take out of education: the fear of worrying about what marks you'll get detention worrying about letting people down your parents teachers.

My hope was that organizations would start including this range of skills in their training programs - in other words offer an adult education in social and emotional intelligence.

It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another his education is incomplete.

Learning is a result of listening which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words to learn from the child we must have empathy and empathy grows as we learn.