I find it hard in my general life to think further than the week ahead.

I've said yes to everything that Jon Stewart has asked me to do. That's been a pretty good career decision, I think.

You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well. It was probably years before I was confident enough in stand-up that I was able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, the way I wanted to talk about them.

It's pretty physically unsettling, living life on a visa.

I've always been interested in socially political, or overtly political, comedy.

I wanted to be a soccer player. I knew that couldn't happen.

I did sketch comedy, but I never did improv. So I've just tried to learn as I go.

It was probably years before I was confident enough in stand-up that I was able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, the way I wanted to talk about them.

Here in America, people come out to see what they've known you to do. In England, it's like everyone comes out to tell you exactly how well they think you're doing.

I knew I was going to go into the field and make fun of people to their faces. I knew what I was getting into.

People are friendlier in New York than London.

You just try to be true to your idea of what is funny and what is also interesting.

I think Americans still can't help but respond to the natural authority of this voice. Deep down they long to be told what to do by a British accent. That's why so many infomercials have British people.

I feel more at home knowing I'm not really at home. It takes all the pressure off you trying to fit in!

People are always going to say stupid things, and you're always going to be able to make jokes about that, but it should be the last thing you add in, because it's the easiest thing.

I have exactly as much rhythm as you think I have.

There are two kinds of hecklers: the destructive and constructive hecklers.

I would never heckle someone. That's why I think I'm so interested in someone that would.

Politics has become infused with narcissism in America.

You can only love and be loved to the extent that you know and are known by somebody.

For most of us, the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.

Sin is, somehow, at the root of all human misery. Sin is what keeps us from God and from life. It is in the face of every battered woman, the cry of every neglected child, the despair of every addict, the death of every victim of every war.

My main job is to live with deep contentment, joy, and confidence in my everyday experience of life with God. Everything else is job number two.

Prudence is foresight and far-sightedness. It's the ability to make immediate decisions on the basis of their longer-range effects.

Prudence is not hesitation, procrastination, or moderation. It is not driving in the middle of the road. It is not the way of ambivalence, indecision, or safety.

Politics, after all, is largely about power. And power goes to the core of our issues of control and narcissism and need to be right and tendency to divide the human race into 'us' vs. 'them.'

The soul is both the most fragile and most resilient thing about you; a healthy soul is what holds you together when your world falls apart. Since you will carry your soul into eternity, it's worth checking up on it at least as often as your teeth.

Over time, grit is what separates fruitful lives from aimlessness.

God has entrusted us with his most precious treasure - people. He asks us to shepherd and mold them into strong disciples, with brave faith and good character.

The human longings that are deep inside of us never go away. They exist across cultures; they exist throughout life. When people were first made, our deepest longing was to know and be known. And after the Fall, when we all got weird, it's still our deepest longing - but it's now also our deepest fear.

I don't have a problem with delegation. I love to delegate. I am either lazy enough, or busy enough, or trusting enough, or congenial enough, that the notion leaving tasks in someone else's lap doesn't just sound wise to me, it sounds attractive.

Normally, if someone's legacy will outlast their life, it's apparent when they die. On the day when Alexander the Great, or Caesar Augustus, or Napoleon, or Socrates, or Muhammad died, their reputations were immense. When Jesus died, his tiny, failed movement appeared clearly at an end.

The New Testament doesn't present Jesus as a single man to cover up his humanity. It presents him as a single man because... he was a single man.

Learning something new is a fabulous way to be refreshed. When work can grind you down, something about learning a new activity thrills the soul. It reminds you that the world is bigger than your desk and your to-do list.

Gratitude is what we radiate when we experience grace, and the soul was made to run on grace the way a 747 runs on rocket fuel.

Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.

When it comes to sermon writing, generally there are two problems. Some preachers love the research stage but hate the writing, and they start writing too late. Others don't like doing research, so they move way too fast to the writing part.

Spiritual formation is for everyone. Just as there is an 'outer you' that is being formed and shaped all the time, like it or not, by accident or on purpose, so there is an 'inner you.' You have a spirit. And it's constantly being shaped and tugged at: by what you hear and watch and say and read and think and experience.

Preaching a series allows you to go into greater depth in the text, and spending several weeks on one theme allows the teaching to be absorbed more thoroughly.

Sloth is the failure to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done - like the kamikaze pilot who flew seventeen missions.

A simple way to address hidden curriculum issues is to spend time talking with staff and key leaders about their spiritual lives.

From ancient times, the core idea of the soul is the soul is the capacity to integrate different functions into a single being or into a single person. The soul is what holds us all together: what connects our will and our minds and our bodies and connects us to God.

Both hope and pessimism are deeply contagious. And no one is more infectious than a leader.

I wrote 'Soul Keeping' because we are taught more about how to care for our cars than how to steward our souls. But you cannot have an impactful life with an impoverished soul.

Sin is protean. It is a cancer that keeps mutating, and just when you think you have killed off one form, it turns out a deadlier strain yet is threatening your heart.

Prudence is what makes someone a great commodities trader - the capacity to face reality squarely in the eye without allowing emotion or ego to get in the way. It's what is needed by every quarterback or battlefield general.

Universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard all began as Jesus-inspired efforts to love God with all ones' mind.

Skill at helping people grow spiritually, like skill at playing chess, depends on understanding and valuing differences.

The church is in the hope business. We, of all people, ought to be known most for our hope because our hope is founded on something deeper than human ability or wishful thinking.

I hate how hard spiritual transformation is and how long it takes. I hate thinking about how many people have gone to church for decades and remain joyless or judgmental or bitter or superior.