A clever mind is not a heart.

What can you do when you are grief-stricken? Shocked yet again by abrupt horror? How do you get through the day when you are angry, sad, frustrated and beginning to feel hopeless? How discouraging is it to realize our seemingly endless capacity for our inhumanity toward each other?

Take heart. And action. Me? I went to my bookshelf for solace. Herewith, some timeless words:

• If coercion, self-assertion and conflict are regarded as permissible and necessary instruments of social redemption, how are perpetual conflict and perennial tyranny to be avoided? Reinhold Niebhur

• Try as one may, it is as impossible to go against the spontaneous Tao as to live in some other time than now, or some other place than here. Alan Watts

• Do not attempt too much at once. Aesop

• How do I guess at the future? Based on the omens of the present. The secret is here in the present. If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And, if you improve upon the present, what comes later will also be better. Forget about the future, and live each day according to the teachings, confident that God loves his children. Each day, in itself, brings with it an eternity. Paulo Coelho

• It's rather significant, we think, that those who have no compassion have no wisdom. Knowledge, yes; cleverness, maybe; wisdom, no. A clever mind is not a heart. Knowledge doesn't really care. Wisdom does. Benjamin Hoff

• Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again. Henry David Thoreau

Take heart. Take action. And, take heart again. There is infinite love. With that, you are capable of compassion and wisdom.