No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.

Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.

Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

Faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidentally that's also the definition of delusion.

Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don't see you jumping out of buildings.

Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.

The less you think, the more you believe.

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

Science is the poetry of reality.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

To worry is to wear yourself out.

Speaking from the heart is simple. Listening wholeheartedly, however, is much, much more difficult and most rare.

Struggles are inevitable, just as much as pain.

You have to have passion for everything you do, and you've got to look at the positive side.

Life is not about creating an unreal existence. People should be challenged to find something cool about the mundane.

When a crisis occurs, I feel that one of my greatest responsibilities is to set a tone of calm no matter what the problems. Sometimes I have to fake confidence a lot. I also have to fake calm.

Divine love always has been, and always will be, the answer that you seek.

You might be a redneck if your satellite dish payment delays buying school clothes for the kids.

Life is full of wonderful passions that come and go over the years, but the only one that will never let you down is reading.

Read. Read. Read. Just don't read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different styles.