Tippett Quotes & Sayings

My life of conversation leads me to reimagine the very meaning of hope. I define hope as distinct from optimism or idealism. It has nothing to do with wishing. It references reality at every turn and reveres truth. It lives open eyed and wholeheartedly with the darkness that is woven ineluctably into the light of life and sometimes seems to overcome it. Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a habit that becomes spiritual muscle memory. — Krista Tippett

I'm strangely comforted when I hear from scientists that human beings are the most complex creatures we know of in the universe, still, by far. Black holes are in their way explicable; the simplest living being is not. I lean a bit more confidently into the experience that life is so endlessly perplexing. I love that word. Spiritual life is a way of dwelling with perplexity - taking it seriously, searching for its purpose as well as its perils, its beauty as well as its ravages. — Krista Tippett

In life, in religion, in science, this I believe: any conviction worth its salt has chosen to cohabit with a piece of mystery, and that mystery is at the essence of the vitality and growth of the thing. The — Krista Tippett

If God is God, we can't be afraid of what we can learn. — Krista Tippett

Truth can be told in an instant, forgiveness can be offered spontaneously, but reconciliation is the work of lifetimes and generations. — Krista Tippett

Spiritual humility is not about getting small, not about debasing oneself, but about approaching everything and everyone else with a readiness to see goodness and to be surprised. This is the humility of a child, which Jesus lauded. It is the humility of the scientist and the mystic. It has a lightness of step, not a heaviness of heart. That lightness is the surest litmus test I know for recognizing wisdom when you see it in the world or feel its stirrings in yourself. — Krista Tippett

Oments of transport, and of comfort, and of a bracing vastness of possibility. That was all there for me sometimes when I plunged my mind into the Bible's puzzles; and it was always there in the music of church. I wouldn't have said it this way then. But I would feel all the cells in my body as I sang hymns that connected my little life with the grandeur of the cosmos, the Christian drama across space and time. This was my earliest experience of breath and body, mind and spirit soaring together, alive to both mystery and reality, in kinship with others both familiar and unknown. That's one way I'd define the feeling of faith now. — Krista Tippett

God is that force that drives us to really see each other and to really behold each other and care for each other and respond to each other. And for me, that is actually enough. That cultivating it, that thinking about it, worshipping it, working towards it, taking care of it, nurturing it in myself, nurturing it in other people, that really is a life's work right there, and it doesn't have to be any bigger than that. God doesn't have to be out in the next solar system over bashing asteroids together. It's plenty, just the God that I work with. Kate Braestrup — Krista Tippett

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. — Krista Tippett

The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are. — Krista Tippett

Before he died in 2013, the great sociologist Robert Bellah said that his view of everything he'd studied across his life was tilted on its axis by this late recognition: when mammals began to bring forth offspring from the center of their bodies, spiritual life became possible. With apes and far more with humans, the period of necessary parental care - care in order for the offspring to survive - became longer and longer. The long helplessness of the child generated a sphere of softening, experimentation, and creativity in self-understanding and shared life. This is the biological groundwork for the axial move - stepping out of fear and into care beyond one's self. The religions apprehended this long ago and wove it into language; compassion in both Hebrew and Arabic derives from the word for womb. — Krista Tippett

justice makes charity less necessary — Krista Tippett

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

I teach in a university, and I think about where's the place in that kind of educational institution for embodied knowledge? And how do we cultivate that? And how do we trust it? But — Krista Tippett

To be alive is by definition messy, always leaning towards disorder and surprise. How — Krista Tippett

Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading. — Michael Tippett

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. — Krista Tippett

Maybe this is another way to think about original sin - the ingrained lure of the possibility of going numb, a habit of acquiescence to it. — Krista Tippett

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. — Krista Tippett

You realized you were surrounded by love, that you were held by love, and that you'd had too small an imagination about that word, that thing. Romantic love, absolutely. Our notion of love - it just seems a very unevolved and very unenlightened notion. That it's this one person who you will meet. Eve Ensler — Krista Tippett

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. — Krista Tippett

Race, john powell says, is like gravity, experienced by all, understood by few. — Krista Tippett

Conductors don't suffer, they are part of the performance. — Michael Tippett

Kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues. — Krista Tippett

I take embodiment very seriously, and, of course, depression is a full-body experience and a full-body immersion in the darkness. And it is an invitation - at least my kind of depression is an invitation - to take our embodied selves a lot more seriously than we tend to do when we're in the up-up-and-away mode. Let's — Krista Tippett

I'm consciously shedding the assumption that a skeptical point of view is the most intellectually credible. Intellect does not function in opposition to mystery; tolerance is not more pragmatic than love; and cynicism is not more reasonable than hope. Unlike almost every worthwhile thing in life, cynicism is easy. It's never proven wrong by the corruption or the catastrophe. It's not generative. It judges things as they are, but does not lift a finger to try to shift them. I — Krista Tippett

The spiritual energy of our time, as I've come to understand it, is not a rejection of the rational disciplines by which we've ordered our common life for many decades - law, politics, economics, science. It is, rather, a realization that these disciplines have a limited scope. They can't ask ultimate questions ... they don't begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in life, what matters in a death, how to love, how we can be of service to each other. These are the kinds of questions religion arose to address and religions traditions are keepers of conversation across generations about them. — Krista Tippett

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

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. — Krista Tippett

This is something special. You can attempt to have a kind of non-living music. — Michael Tippett

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. — Krista Tippett

Tikkun Olam. There is a Jewish legend behind this notion. Sometime early in the life of the world, something happened to shatter the light of the universe into countless pieces. They lodged as sparks inside every part of the creation. The highest human calling is to look for this original light from where we sit, to point to it and gather it up and in so doing to repair the world. This can sound like an idealistic and fanciful tale. But Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, who told it to me as her Hasidic grandfather told it to her, calls it an important and empowering story for our time. It insists that each one of us, flawed and inadequate as we may feel, has exactly what's needed to help repair the part of the world that we can see and touch. — Krista Tippett

Pico Iyer: And at some point, I thought, well, I've been really lucky to see many, many places. Now, the great adventure is the inner world, now that I've spent a lot of time gathering emotions, impressions, and experiences. Now, I just want to sit still for years on end, really, charting that inner landscape because I think anybody who travels knows that you're not really doing so in order to move around - you're traveling in order to be moved. And really what you're seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you're sleepwalking through your daily life. I thought, there's this great undiscovered terrain that Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Merton and Emily Dickinson fearlessly investigated, and I want to follow in their footsteps. — Krista Tippett

We have to be educated by the other. My heart cannot be educated by myself. It can only come out of a relationship with others. And if we accept being educated by others, to let them explain to us what happens to them, and to let yourself be immersed in their world so that they can get into our world, then you begin to share something very deep. You will never be the person in front of you, but you will have created what we call communion. — Krista Tippett

My true function within a society which embraces all of us is to continue an age-old tradition. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form, whether visual, intellectual or musical. — Michael Tippett

Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a habit that becomes spiritual muscle memory. It's a renewable resource for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be. I — Krista Tippett

The balance of our world frequently is seen as a question of power. If I have more power and more knowledge, more capacity, then I can do more. And when we have power, we can very quickly push people down. I'm the one that knows and you don't know, and I'm strong and I'm powerful, I have the knowledge. This is the history of humanity. And it is in the whole educational system, that we must educate people to become capable and to take their place in society. That has value, obviously. But it's not quite the same thing as to educate people to relate, to listen, to help people to become themselves. — Krista Tippett

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. — Krista Tippett

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. — Krista Tippett

More riveting to me in the end than the politics of Berlin was the vast social experiment its division had become... it was possible to have freedom and plenty in the West and craft an empty life; it was possible to "have nothing" in the East and create a life of intimacy and dignity and beauty. — Krista Tippett

beginners when it came to inner landscapes of beauty that would anchor and nourish them on the inside, beyond work, in the intimate spaces that in the end define us all. — Krista Tippett

Resilience is a successor to mere progress, a companion to sustainability. — Krista Tippett

Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability - a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one's own best self and one's own best words and questions. — Krista Tippett

The interesting and challenging thing about this moment is that we know the old forms aren't working. But we can't yet see what the new forms will be. We are making them up in "real time"; we're even reimagining time. — Krista Tippett

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

Beethoven suppressed everything, his personal life disappeared until he was locked inside. That is a figure quite extreme. — Michael Tippett

To nurture a resilient human being, or a resilient city, is to build in an expectation of adversity, a capacity for inevitable vulnerability. As a word and as a strategy, resilience honors the unromantic reality of who we are and how we are, and so becomes a refreshingly practical compass for the systems and societies we can craft. It's a shift from wish-based optimism to reality-based hope. It is akin to meaningful, sustained happiness - not dependent on a state of perfection or permanent satisfaction, not an emotional response to circumstances of the moment, but a way of being that can meet the range of emotions and experiences, light and dark, that add up to a life. Resilience is at once proactive, pragmatic, and humble. It knows it needs others. It doesn't overcome failure so much as transmute it, integrating it into the reality that evolves. Such — Krista Tippett

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

That's very important about stories. They touch something that is human in us and is probably unchanging. Perhaps this is why the important knowledge is passed through stories. It's what holds a culture together. Culture has a story, and every person in it participates in that story. They world is made up of stories; it's not made up of facts. — Krista Tippett

I've seldom become nostalgic or settled. — Michael Tippett

In human life and in the history of faith, I think, love has a quality of a bedrock reality we discover - adventurers, travelers, each of us, only fitfully apprehending its potential. I take some solace in the fact that I'm not alone in this intuition that the reality of evil, of injustice, of suffering notwithstanding, "at the center of this existence is a heart beating with love." That's how Desmond Tutu put it to me, with greater authority than mine from a life that has known extremes of human cruelty one to another. — Krista Tippett

If we are stretching to live wiser and not just smarter, we will aspire to learn what love means, how it arises and deepens, how it withers and revives, what it looks like as a private good but also a common good. I long to make this word echo differently in hearts and ears - not less complicated, but differently so. Love as muscular, resilient. Love as social - not just about how we are intimately, but how we are together, in public. I want to aspire to a carnal practical love - eros become civic, not sexual and yet passionate, full-bodied. Because it is the best of which we are capable, loving is also supremely exacting, not always but again and again. Love is something we only master in moments. — Krista Tippett

Fear usually looks like anger. — Krista Tippett

My father was a low-budget monster movie maker, so he made classics like 'The Crater Lake Monster.' There were always creatures around. And my dad was a huge fan of Ray Harryhausen. One of our neighbors, who went on to win several Academy Awards, was close friends with my dad. His name is Phil Tippett. — Robert Stromberg

The Greek sculptor - I don't think he was very different from any of us. — Michael Tippett

Kindness is the stuff of moments, but it can be absolutely transformative in moments. Beautiful lives are transformative in moments. But we have to train ourselves to look for them. — Krista Tippett

Heroes aren't heroes because they worship the light, but because they know the darkness all to well to stand down and live with it. — Ninya Tippett

I am quite certain in my heart of hearts that modern music and modern art is not a conspiracy, but is a form of truth and integrity for those who practise it honestly, decently and with all their being. — Michael Tippett

John Lewis said, You have to be taught the way of peace, the way of love, the way of nonviolence. In the religious sense, in the moral sense, you can say that in the bosom of every human being, there is a spark of the divine. So you don't have a right as a human to abuse that spark of the divine in your fellow human being. From time to time, we would discuss that, if you have someone attacking you, beating you, spitting on you, you have to think of that person. Years ago that person was an innocent child, an innocent little baby. What happened? Did something go wrong? Did someone teach that person to hate, to abuse others? You try to appeal to the goodness of every human being and you don't give up. You never give up on anyone. — Krista Tippett

Tolerance is not really a lived virtue; it's more of a cerebral ascent. — Krista Tippett

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. — Krista Tippett

As the era of care-less food comes to a reckoning, we're relearning the astonishingly elemental delight in growing what we eat and preparing it as though it matters. It's — Krista Tippett

Music is a performing art, as any Native American will tell you. It isn't there in the score. — Michael Tippett

Listening is about being present, not just about being quiet. I meet others with the life I've lived, not just with my questions. — Krista Tippett

The Internet - its beauty is that it's a self-perfecting organism, right? But as long as it's an ad-supported medium, the motive will be to perfect commercial interest, to perfect the art of the listicle, the endless slideshow, the infinitely paginated oracle, and not to perfect the human spirit of the reader or the writer. You've — Krista Tippett

Public notice does not necessarily accord with internal fulfilment. — Michael Tippett

Taking in the good, whenever and wherever we find it, gives us new eyes for seeing and living. — Krista Tippett

Nature has different times. — Michael Tippett

Music is a performance and needs the audience. — Michael Tippett

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. — Krista Tippett

I'm drawn to the Jewish notion of the soul, nephesh, which is not something preexistent but emergent - forming in and through physicality and relational experience. This suggests that we need our bodies to claim our souls. The body is where every virtue lives or dies, but more: our bodies are access points to mystery. And in some way that barely makes sense to me, I'm sure that we have to have feet planted on the ground, literally and metaphysically, to reach towards what is beyond and above us. — Krista Tippett

The mystery and art of living are as grand as the sweep of a lifetime and the lifetime of a species. And they are as close as beginning, quietly, to mine whatever grace and beauty, whatever healing and attentiveness, are possible in this moment and the next and the next one after that. — Krista Tippett

I am no prince if not yours. -Brandon Maxfield — Ninya Tippett

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

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. — Krista Tippett

I'm also thinking a lot lately that Descartes has so much to answer for - his idea, "I think therefore I am." Western culture is so built around this overly cerebral disembodied way we've created all of our institutions, and we're impoverished by it. We're so much smaller for it. So — Krista Tippett

I was thinking about the act of asking real questions in poems as a kind of spiritual practice. I ask questions relatively often in poems and I ask them because I don't know the answer. And I ask them because I think that poems are fantastic spaces with which to arrive at real conundrum-y kinds of questions, to go as far down the road as you can of understanding something and then sometimes that road ends with a real question. So — Krista Tippett

app, 'Functional Ear Trainer' which isn't like any other ear trainer in the way that it teaches you relative pitch in the context of cadences instead of just guessing random intervals. Check out the creator's website here. And — Graham Tippett

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry. — Michael Tippett

Compassion is a spiritual technology. — Krista Tippett

Sister Simone Campbell: I sometimes think we, in the United States, think we ought to do something about everything and that it's my job to fix everything. Well, it's not. That's way beyond us. It's more important, I think, that we listen deeply to our stories and then see where it leads. And that's the piece. If we all do our part ... Whatever our part is, wherever we are. Whatever our part is. Just do one thing. That's all we have to do. The guilt - or the curse - of the progressive, the liberal, the whatever, is that we think we have to do it all. And then we get overwhelmed. I get all those solicitations in the mail. And I can't do everything. And so I don't do anything. But that's the mistake. Community is about just doing my part. — Krista Tippett

I learned to be wary that summer of a pious approach to life that saw good intentions and righteous prayer as substitutes for planning and pragmatic action. — Krista Tippett

We've made it private, contained it in family, when its audacity is in its potential to cross tribal lines. We've fetishized it as romance, when its true measure is a quality of sustained, practical care. We've lived it as a feeling, when it is a way of being. It is the elemental experience we all desire and seek, most of our days, to give and receive. The sliver of love's potential that the Greeks separated out as eros is where we load so much of our desire, center so much of our imagination about delight and despair, define so much of our sense of completion. There is the love the Greeks called filia - the love of friendship. There is the love they called agape - love as embodied compassion, expressions of kindness that might be given to a neighbor or a stranger. The Metta of the root Buddhist Pali tongue, "lovingkindness," carries the nuance of benevolent, active interest in others known and unknown, and its cultivation begins with compassion towards oneself. — Krista Tippett

Why America has never made the connection between tract housing and psychosis is beyond me — Jackson Tippett McCrae

I'm outside the music I've made. I have no interest in it. — Michael Tippett

'fundamentalism' and 'liberalism' and terrorism.' These labels only tell us partial truths. We must use them humbly, guardedly, Niebuhr would say, aware of the limitations of our own vision and of our own capacity for misunderstanding and self-deception. — Krista Tippett

Our spiritual traditions have carried virtues across time. They are tools for the art of living. They are pieces of intelligence about human behavior that neuroscience is now exploring with new words and images: what we practice, we become. What's true of playing the piano or throwing a ball also holds for our capacity to move through the world mindlessly and destructively or generously and gracefully. I've come to think of virtues and rituals as spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, time and space. There are superstar virtues that come most readily to mind and can be the work of a day or a lifetime - love, compassion, forgiveness. And there are gentle shifts of mind and habit that make those possible, working patiently through the raw materials of our lives. — Krista Tippett

Love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. — Krista Tippett

The incredible thing about children is they're unified in their body, whereas we can be very disunified. We can say one thing and feel another. And — Krista Tippett

I remain a humanist. We are a very curious race. — Michael Tippett

When we use terms we get confused, yet we have no other way. — Michael Tippett

We are among the first peoples in human history who do not broadly inherit religious identity as a given, a matter of kin and tribe, like hair color and hometown. But the very fluidity of this - the possibility of choice that arises, the ability to craft and discern one's own spiritual bearings - is not leading to the decline of spiritual life but its revival. — Krista Tippett

I'm helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are "near enemies" to every great virtue - reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can't possibly make a difference. The wise Buddhist anthropologist and teacher Roshi Joan Halifax calls this a "pathological empathy" of our age. In the face of magnitudes of pain in the world that come to us in pictures immediate and raw, many of us care too much and see no evident place for our care to go. But compassion goes about finding the work that can be done. Love can't help but stay present — Krista Tippett

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. — Krista Tippett

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. — Krista Tippett

To love you fully is to love you in every way possible, even in the smallest, most inconspicuous ways that will eventually all lead back to you. — Ninya Tippett

Characters are an extreme form in Shakespeare's theater. — Michael Tippett

The thing about the raw materials of the life of the spirit is that they are always changing. What you see in the past is dependent on what you are able to see now. I've — Krista Tippett

I can disagree with your opinion, it turns out, but I can't disagree with your experience. And once I have a sense of your experience, you and I are in relationship, acknowledging the complexity in each other's position, listening less guardedly. The difference in our opinions will probably remain intact, but it no longer defines what is possible between us. — Krista Tippett

Poetry is language that speaks to our hearts. And I'm using the biblical word heart. I think the closest equivalent to that in 21st-century language is our imaginations. The heart, in biblical physiology, is the center of our emotions, but also of our intellect. Those two things cannot be separated. And poetic language is precise. It is detailed, it's realistic, but it is not the discursive language of mere fact. — Krista Tippett