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.

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.

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.

In the wrong environment your weakness is evident, but in the right environment, you function from a place of strength.

Adventures, I reflected, are all very fine but a certain amount of civilised comfort forms the true kernel of our desires.

When we separate music from life we get art.

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

None but those who work are entitled to eat.

Life is a lot more fun if you treat its challenges in creative ways.

Only one man ever betrayed my confidence, and that only in a minor matter.

You must rouse into people's consciousness their own prudence and strength, if you want to raise their character.

... is there anything more unjust than to build gold and brass and iron on poor, well-meaning clay, -- and then blame the clay when the whole image falls into dust?

I'm often asked whether I believe in Global Warming. I now just reply with the question: "Do you believe in Gravity?"