The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.

The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.

What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.

We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.

If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.

We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.