Krista Tippett Quotes

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 an...

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 pos...

About Author

Krista Tippett (née Weedman; born November 9, 1960) is an American journalist, author, and public intellectual. Since 2003, she has served as creator and host of the Peabody Award winning program On Being. In 2014, Tippett was awarded the National Humanities Medal by U.S. President Barack Obama.
Tippett is the author of The New York Times best selling books Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living (2016), Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit (2010), and Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters—and How to Talk About It (2008). In 2019 she was named the Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor at Stanford University. In 2025 Tippett was named a Chubb Fellow at Yale University.

Moments 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 musi...

Sister Simone Campbell:

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...

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 solac...

But that (physical attractiveness), as the late great Irish poet and philosopher of beauty John O’Donohue helpfully distinguished, is glamour. I’ve taken his definition as my own, for naming beauty in...

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, impre...

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...

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, t...

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

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 as...

Fear usually looks like anger.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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 wha...

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