Top 80 Krista Tippett Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Listening is about being present, not just about being quiet.”

— Krista Tippett

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

— Krista Tippett

3. “Compassion is a spiritual technology.”

— Krista Tippett

4. “Kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues.”

— Krista Tippett

5. “Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a practice that becomes spiritual muscle memory. It’s a renewable resource for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be.”

— Krista Tippett

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

— Krista Tippett

7. “You can disagree with another person’s opinions. You can disagree with their doctrines. You can’t disagree with their experience.”

— Krista Tippett

8. “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.”

— Krista Tippett

9. “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

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

— Krista Tippett

11. “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.”

— Krista Tippett

12. “Fear usually looks like anger.”

— Krista Tippett

13. “Truth can be told in an instant, forgiveness can be offered spontaneously, but reconciliation is the work of lifetimes and generations.”

— Krista Tippett

14. “Taking in the good, whenever and wherever we find it, gives us new eyes for seeing and living.”

— Krista Tippett

15. “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.”

— Krista Tippett

16. “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

17. “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

18. “God delights in beauty, Islam teaches at its core, and is beauty. Beauty is in creation, not destruction, and in balance. It is in the human intellect and the human heart and in their powers to apply sacred text towards creation and knowledge that edifies and enlivens.”

— Krista Tippett

19. “Beauty is that in the presence of which we feel more alive.”

— Krista Tippett

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “It’s not about healing the world by making a huge difference. It’s about healing the world that touches you, that’s around you.”

— Krista Tippett

24. “But our world is abundant with beauty and courage and grace. I’m aware of a growing aspiration to attend, with all the tools we have at hand, to the human change that makes social change possible. The digital world, though a new Wild West in many ways, is on some basic level simply another screen on which we project the excesses and possibilities of life in flesh and blood.”

— Krista Tippett

25. “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

26. “Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a habit that becomes spiritual muscle memory.”

— Krista Tippett

27. “Hope is an orientation, an insistence on wresting wisdom and joy from the endlessly fickle fabric of space and time.”

— Krista Tippett

28. “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

29. “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.” In.”

— Krista Tippett

30. “Resilience is a successor to mere progress, a companion to sustainability.”

— Krista Tippett

31. “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

32. “Well, when I say “poetry is not all love, love, love,” I mean romantic love is where we go first with the word. But really there is so much more to the word. The word is sober. The word is grave. The word is not just about something light and happy and pleasurable. The word calls up deep, deep responsibilities.”

— Krista Tippett

33. “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

34. “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

35. “At the right temperatures, geologic faults allow for movement, ductility, flow. Earthquakes happen when weaknesses cannot be expressed. “And communities which are rigid, which do not take into account the weak points of the community – people who are in difficulty – tend to be communities that do not evolve. When they do evolve, it’s generally by a very strong commotion, a revolution.”

— Krista Tippett

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

— Krista Tippett

37. “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

38. “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.”

— Krista Tippett

39. “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.”

— Krista Tippett

40. “It’s a collection of pointers that treat the margins as seriously as the noisy center. For change has always happened in the margins, across human history, and it’s happening there now. Seismic shifts in common life, as in geophysical reality, begin in spaces and cracks.”

— Krista Tippett

41. “We chose too small a word in the decade of my birth – tolerance – to make the world we want to live in now. We opened to the racial difference that had been there all along, separate but equal, and to a new infusion of religions, ethnicities, and values. But tolerance doesn’t welcome. It allows, endures, indulges. In the medical lexicon, it is about the limits of thriving in an unfavorable environment.”

— Krista Tippett

42. “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

43. “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

44. “A mystic is anyone who has a gnawing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradiction, and discontinuities that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity.”

— Krista Tippett

45. “Internet is in its infancy. It is at a fundamental level a new canvas for the old human condition, salvation and sin, at digital speed and with viral replication. It is a magnifying glass on every human inclination, beautiful and terrible, trivial and mean, generous and curious. Take note of how this realization puts the power back with us.”

— Krista Tippett

46. “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.”

— Krista Tippett

47. “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

48. “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

49. “I come to understand that for most of my life, when I was looking for love, I was looking to be loved. In this, I am a prism of my world. I am a novice at love in all its fullness, a beginner.”

— Krista Tippett

50. “I’ve come to understand the cumulative dialogue of my work as a kind of cartography of wisdom about our emerging world. This book is a map in words to important territory we all are on now together. It’s a collection of pointers that treat the margins as seriously as the noisy center. For change has always happened in the margins, across human history, and it’s happening there now. Seismic shifts in common life, as in geophysical reality, begin in spaces and cracks.”

— Krista Tippett