Life is filled with secrets. You can't learn them all at once.

The power of human thought grows exponentially with the number of minds that share that thought.

My sincere hope is that 'The Da Vinci Code,' in addition to entertaining people, will serve as an open door to begin their own explorations.

Force a hand, the voice warned, and it will fight you. But convince a mind to think as you want it to think, and you have an ally.

"Both Christianity and Islam are logocentric," he told his students, "meaning they are focused on the Word. In Christian tradition, the Word became flesh in the book of John: 'And the Word was made flesh, and He dwelt among us. 'Therefore, it was acceptable to depict the Word as having a human form. In Islamic tradition, however, the Word did not become flesh, and therefore the Word needs to remain in the form of a word … in most cases, calligraphic renderings of the names of the holy figures of Islam."

Whether or not you believe in God, you must believe this: when we as a species abandon our trust in a power greater than us, we abandon our sense of accountability. Faiths… all faiths… are admonitions that there is something we cannot understand, something to which we are accountable. With faith we are accountable to each other, to ourselves, and to a higher truth. Religion is flawed, but only because man is flawed. The church consists of a brotherhood of imperfect, simple souls wanting only to be a voice of compassion in a world spinning out of control.

The truth can be glimpsed only through the eyes of death.