I'd hope that the story A Dog's Purpose helps everyone reflect on how many different lives we all live - from children to teenager to adults to seniors - and how each phase of life presents new situations along the way to discovering our ultimate purpose.

I think one of the wonderful messages of A Dog's Purpose is how difficult it is for humans to master love without making it a muddy mess. God invented love and it is therefore perfect, and dogs are better at celebrating this perfection than we are. When in doubt as to how we should feel, we could do far worse than trying to live life like the dogs.

Some people just don’t appreciate having a dog around. It’s sad to think there are people like that. I knew Gloria was that way—maybe that’s why she could never be truly happy.

That's the lesson of the dogs, that it's important to both live in the moment and then go on to the next wonderful thing.

I wouldn't say that I have overcome opposition so much as I have tried to understand it. The lash of judgment carries a wounding sting, and there's a deeply instinctual tendency to want to respond in kind. I am not proud that my thoughts were blackened with vile opinions about the nature of those who were attacking me.

Because failure isn't an option if success is just a matter of more effort.

Apparently there are three levels of brain activity. Level 1 is the lowest level - the amount of concentration required to, say, delete emails or serve in congress.

I want to know what good is a web search engine that returns 324,909,188 'matches' to my key word. That's like saying, Good news, we've located the product you're looking for. It's on Earth.

Dogs have important jobs, like barking when the doorbell rings, but cats have no function in a house whatsoever.

Kansas is a piece of real estate that completely disproves the theory of roundness as a quality of the planet earth.

My purpose, my whole life, had been to love him and be with him, to make him happy. I didn’t want to cause any unhappiness now—in that way, I decided it was probably better than he wasn’t here to see this, though I missed him so much at that moment the ache of it was as bad as the strange pains in my belly.

You can usually tell that a man is good if he has a dog who loves him.

Most of what happens in the world is far beyond a dog's comprehension, so they must turn to their faith in us to help them navigate life's treacheries. Don't we, also, have unanswerable questions about the vagaries of modern existence for which the answer is beyond human grasp, so that only our faith can guide us?

Dog’ is ‘God’ spelled backward you know that. That’s why you’re here, to help the nuns do God’s work.