Prayer is not adult letters written to Santa Claus, and God is not some parent-like figure up in the sky who's going to take care of us.

I do assert that one prepares for eternity not by being religious and keeping the rules, but by living fully, loving wastefully, and daring to be all that each of us has the capacity to be.

The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.

I think one of the things we've got to look out for is human beings claiming that they know how God operates.

The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God.

Was Judas Iscariot a figure of history? I do not think so. There is no mention of him in any source before the 8th decade.

All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.

I don't want a God that would go around killing people's little girls. Neither do I want a God who would kill his own son.

I prepare for death by living.

You can't have a world where 50 percent of the people are dieting and 50 percent of the people are starving if you want stability.

Every year is a year of impact, a month of change and a day of new encounters. Its all in the mind to make the impact, see the change and conquer new encounters.

When I’m away from you I am lost.But when I’m with you, I am lost in you.

Adversity is the litmus of faith, and only by continuing on in a spirit of total determination and self belief do we achieve what we set out to do.

All men's gains are the fruit of venturing.

Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.

My greatest debt will always be to the movie-going public of yesterday and today, without whose love and devotion I would have had no story to tell.

Love is full of imagination.

Streamlining the army with Chinese characteristics is the right choice for China in military modernization.

People think I'm a miserable sod but it's only because I get asked such bloody miserable questions.

Maybe it was my revenge on people who had been unkind to me as a child. But it was very easy and a thrill to freeze up children.