Top 80 Krista Tippett Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “When you admire people, you put them on pedestals. When you love people, you want to be together.”

— Krista Tippett

53. “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

54. “Race, john powell says, is like gravity, experienced by all, understood by few.”

— Krista Tippett

55. “I don’t know why it is, how it is, but it’s the authentic, the unique, the different that makes us feel enriched when we encounter it. And a bland, plastic, synthetic, universal can’t-tell-one-brand-of-coffee-from-another-brand-of-coffee by contrast makes life flat, uninteresting, and essentially uncreative.”

— Krista Tippett

56. “Really feeling your body move and the life inside of yourself is critical. Western culture is astoundingly disembodied and uniquely so.”

— Krista Tippett

57. “Now is a powerful time in this country for young people and others to be asking the question, What are we for? Do we exist for some reason other than competing with China or finding the best possible technological advances?”

— Krista Tippett

58. “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.”

— Krista Tippett

59. “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.”

— Krista Tippett

60. “Healing,” said the poet, “is not a science but the intuitive art of wooing nature.”

— Krista Tippett

61. “Einstein said this funny thing, that only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And then he said, “I’m not so sure about the universe.”

— Krista Tippett

62. “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

63. “By being what only I can be, I give humanity what only I can give. It is my uniqueness that allows me to contribute something unique to the universal heritage of humankind. I sum up the Jewish imperative, very simply – and it has been like this since the days of Abraham: to be true to your faith is a blessing to others regardless of their faith. That’s the big paradox when you really reach the very depth of particularity.”

— Krista Tippett

64. “Spirituality doesn’t look like sitting down and meditating. Spirituality looks like folding the towels in a sweet way and talking kindly to the people in the family even though you’ve had a long day.”

— Krista Tippett

65. “Here are some words I love, words that describe presence rather than means towards an end: nourishing, edifying, redemptive; courageous, generous, winsome; adventurous, curious, tender.”

— Krista Tippett

66. “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

67. “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

68. “We watch our technologies becoming more intelligent, and speculate imaginatively about their potential to become conscious. All the while, we have it in us to become wise.”

— Krista Tippett

69. “This realization unsettled my sense of personal progress and education: 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

70. “I’ve come to believe that our capacity to reach beyond ourselves – experiencing mystery or being present to others – is dependent on how fully we are planted in our bodies in all their flaws and their grace.”

— Krista Tippett

71. “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

72. “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

73. “I believed – and still believe – that when all is said and done, none of us will be measured on how much we accomplish but on how well we love.”

— Krista Tippett

74. “There are places in human experience that politics cannot analyze or address, and they hold more possibility for change than we can begin to imagine.”

— Krista Tippett

75. “Lonely is one of the adjectives people like Shane Claiborne use, alongside unsustainable, to describe the culture of adulthood they grew up watching.”

— Krista Tippett

76. “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.”

— Krista Tippett

77. “We knew what we were against. We just didn’t know what we were for.”

— Krista Tippett

78. “But what we did is we studied our town. We did an inventory of all of the things that were present there – farms and marshes and springs and historic sites, Indian trails, buildings, our tobacco farms included. And what happened after we did this very careful and very extensive inventory is, we fell in love with the place. Most of us didn’t know where we lived. We had just moved in and out rather oblivious to the beauty of things.”

— Krista Tippett

79. “Tolerance is not really a lived virtue; it’s more of a cerebral ascent.”

— Krista Tippett

80. “More to the point: the growing universe of the Nones – the new nonreligious – is one of the most spiritually vibrant and provocative spaces in modern life. It is not a world in which spiritual life is absent. It is a world that resists religious excesses and shallows.”

— Krista Tippett

81. “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

82. “Sometimes one wise voice that has been in the world for a while and evolved, lived the same human drama from a few different angles, can provide more nuance than any two-sided debate.”

— Krista Tippett

83. “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

84. “Structure is something that calms our nature; we know this of toddlers.”

— Krista Tippett

85. “If God is God, we cant be afraid of what we can learn.”

— Krista Tippett

86. “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

87. “W. H. Auden, “We must love one another or die.” That is, I think, where we are at the beginning of the 21st century. And since we really can love one another, I have a great deal of hope.”

— Krista Tippett