Most mystics do not want to read religious wisdom; they want to be it. A postcard of a beautiful lake is not a beautiful lake, and Sufis may be defined as those who dance in the lake.

It remained for the twentieth century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, however, the atom must be bombarded from without. So too, locked in every human being is a store of love that partakes of the divine-the imago dei-image of God, it is sometimes called. And it too can be activated only through bombardment, in its case love's bombardment

I don't want to justify religion in terms of its benefits to us. I believe that, on balance, it does a lot of bad things, too - a tremendous amount. But I don't think that the final justification of religion is the good it does for people. I think the final justification is that it's true, and truth takes priority over consequences. Religion helps us deal with what is most important to the human spirit: values, meaning, purpose, and quality.

Religion teaches us that our lives here on earth are to be used for transformation.

Science can prove nothing about God, because God lies outside its province.

Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.

My body was born into the - baptized in the Methodist church, and it will be buried in the Methodist Church. Meanwhile, I have a soul. And my soul cannot be confined to any human institution.