You can't get through seminary and come out believing in God!

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians.

Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.

There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.

What you can imagine depends on what you know.

There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.

There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

There is no polite way to suggest to someone that they have devoted their life to a folly.

I don't have famous neighbours and if I did, I'd avoid them. I don't live the jet-set.

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

Among the plastic saints of our times, Jesus has to do all the dying, and all we want to hear is another sermon about his dying.

The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace, The prurient ape's defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much.

The heart wants what the heart wants," she says, somewhat cryptically. I purse my lips in disapproval. "You'd think the heart would know better.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

If you can't get emotional about what you believe in your heart, you're in the wrong business.

It's very easy for me to play silly, but to reveal something closer to you, that's so much harder.

The person who did most to give to analysis the generality and symmetry which are now its pride, was also the person who made mechanics analytical; I mean Euler.