God's love, and hence the love with which we come to love God, is eros and agape at once: a desire for the other that delights in the distance of otherness.

true philosophical atheism must be regarded as a superstition, often nurtured by an infantile wish to live in a world proportionate to one's own hopes or conceptual limitations.

Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience.

The one reality you can't evade is personal experience.

The world is unable to provide any account of its own actuality, and yet there it is all the same.

Evidence for or against God, if it is there, saturates every moment of the experience of existence, every employment of reason, every act of consciousness, every encounter with the world around us.

Popular atheism is not a philosophy but a therapy.

Empiricism in the sciences is a method; naturalism in philosophy is a metaphysics; and the latter neither follows from nor underlies the former.

To bracket form and finality out of one's investigations as far as reason allows is a matter of method, but to deny their reality altogether is a matter of metaphysics.

Each day death corrodes what we call living, and life ceaselessly swallows our desire for the void.

A great man stands on God. A small man stands on a great man.

To be as good as our fathers we must be better, imitation is not discipleship.

I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.

I always thought it was sad that you couldn't get anything really good to eat at concerts, so we sit down with our fans before every show and eat a gourmet meal that we made for them.

The modern pantheist not only sees the god in everything, he takes photographs of it.

People are only what we believe them to be.

The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth whispers, 'I can.

I shook hands with a friendly Arab. I still have my right arm to prove it.