As an atheist, you cannot fully make sense of the music, you have no explanation for the perennial motion and rhythm.

Take Bach or Schubert: Their music was dedicated to God but filled and shaped their worldly lives. If you are a committed atheist, you lean back and miss all the richness of that history.

You cannot spend two thousand years trying to understand God and then simply abandon the question and declare that we’re not interested in it anymore.

I believe that the most important condition for faith is sensitivity to beauty.

It is only true love when you have no choice. Love is the most highly valued disease that is identified by the symptom of You-can´t-help-it.

Those who use language and have nothing but language to express themselves live in a cage that cannot feel comfortable.

Everything direct is positive, everything indirect is negative.

People who don't pay attention to the question of justification are often rather uninteresting, in my opinion. I am most fascinated by characters who struggle with the demands of justification.

If you cannot live without justification, you cannot live; period. And the path towards it is the path of language.

Once you have awakened to the question of faith, you cannot simply return to your everyday agenda like a committed atheist could. You cannot retreat to the comforts of atheism.

You cannot simply discard God like a box that has been emptied.

Not all marketing people are writers, but all writers must learn to be marketers.

When I was teaching at the University of Tehran we were struggling against the implementation of the revolution rules.

Tact is the great ability to see other people as they think you see them.

If a war be undertaken...before the resources of peace have been tried and proved vain to secure it, that war has no defense, it is a national crime.

She could not read a book for fear of the feelings she might find in it.

Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.

I love playing a character that eats on television. It's so fun.

Men and women will forever make gods of others rather than see the god in themselves.

I was very struck when Min. Farrakhan said if Jesus and Muhammad were here today, they'd be embracing each other. That's a tremendous message that needs to be heard more broadly.

Finally, in 1954 [Ho Chi Minh] agreed to the Geneva Agreement, which divided the country temporarily into two zones, in the hope that national elections might unify the country under his leadership.