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

At the center of the religious life is a peculiar kind of joy, the prospect of a happy ending that blossoms from necessarily painful ordeals, the promise of human difficulties embraced and overcome.

Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.

I grew up taking it for granted that missionaries were what American boys grew up to be.

The word translated, koan, it means a problem. But it's a very special problem. And to strip it down to the way it works, you are given a problem which has no rational solution. There is a contradiction built into it. One standard - one is this is the sound of two hands clapping. What is the sound of one hand clapping? And so on. All right, so the first thing is that it brings your rational mind to an impasse.

We become compassionate not from altruism which denies the self for the sake of the other, but from the insight that sees and feels one is the other.

When I read the Upanishads, which are part of Vedanta, I found a profundity of worldview that made my Christianity seem like third grade.