“If you look closely at a tree, you’ll notice its knots and dead branches, just like our bodies. What we learn is that beauty and imperfection go together wonderfully.” – Matthew Fox
“What is common to all paths that are spiritual is, of course, the Spirit-breath, life energy, that is why all true paths are essentially one path because there is only one Spirit, one breath, one life, one energy in the universe. It belongs to none of us and all of us. We all share it. Spiritually does not make up otherworldly; it renders us more fully alive.” – Matthew Fox
“Facing the darkness, admitting the pain, allowing the pain to be a pain, is never easy. This is why courage – big-heartedness – is the most essential virtue on the spiritual journey. But if we fail to let pain be a pain – and our entire patriarchal culture refuses to let this happen – then the pain will haunt us in nightmarish ways. Will become pain’s victims instead of the healers we might become.” – Matthew Fox
“We must work on our souls, enlarging and expanding them. We do so by experiencing all of the life-the beauty and joy as well as the grief and pain. Soul work requires paying attention to life, to the laughter and the sorrow, the enlightening and the frightening, the inspiring and the silly.” – Matthew Fox
“Compassion is not pity … compassion never considers an object as weak or inferior. Compassion, one might say, works from a strength born of an awareness of shared weakness and not from someone else’s weakness. And from the awareness of the mutuality of us all.” – Matthew Fox
