Our whole life consists of despairing of an answer and seeking an answer.

Religion is made up of unrestrained wishes.

God has no other hands than ours. If the sick are to be healed, it is our hands that will heal them. If the lonely and the frightened are to be comforted, it is our embrace, not God's, that will comfort them.

Death is what takes place within us when we look upon others not as gift, blessing, or stimulus but as threat, danger, competition.

To take sides with life and experience how we can transcend ourselves is a process that has many names and faces. Religion is one of those names.

Every acceptance of suffering is an acceptance of that which exists. The denial of every form of suffering can result in a flight from reality in which contact with reality becomes ever thinner, ever more fragmentary. It is impossible to remove oneself totally from suffering, unless one removes oneself from life itself, no longer enters into relationships, makes oneself invulnerable.

To be content with the world as it is is to be dead.