hope and uncertainty [are] the twin ingredients necessary for romance to thrive. ... Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope, or fails as often, as love.

So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there's a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.

the biggest threat to the religious experience may well come from organized religion itself.

Wonder is a bulky emotion. When you let it fill your heart and mind, there isn't room for anxiety, distress or anything else.

Ecstasy is what everyone craves - not love or sex, but a hot-blooded, soaring intensity, in which being alive is a joy and a thrill. That enravishment doesn't give meaning to life, and yet without it life seems meaningless.

I hate the fearful trimming of possibilities that age brings.

Fear is danger to your body, but disgust is danger to your soul.