Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, men of science were all believers. Most of the great early English naturalists were also ministers; they were the only ones who had education and leisure for such pursuits. Darwin himself almost became a minister. God's power was always thought to be most easily and obviously revealed in the majestic works of nature.

longing to travel while you are already traveling is, I admit, a kind of greedy madness

If something is rubbing so hard against you, you can be sure it's working on you.

The reality, certainly in my life, is that we all have love stories that go terribly wrong; we all have horribly broken hearts. And somehow we endure. We're not destroyed by it.

A fish and a bird may indeed fall in love, but where shall they live?

What Richard is talking about is instead admitting to the existence of negative thoughts, understanding where they came from and why they arrived, and then - with great forgiveness and fortitude - dismissing them.

The notion is that human beings are born, (as my Guru has explained many times,) with equivalent potential for both contraction and expansion. The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us, and then it's up to the individual (or the family, or the society) to decide what will be brought forth - the virtues or the malevolence. The madness of this planet is largely a result of human being's difficulty in coming into virtuous balance with himself. Lunacy (both collective and individual) results.