It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.

But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably.

Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations.

The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms.

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.