I have a body and I have a soul. And my body belongs to the faith - in fact, the church - into which it was born, the Methodist Church.

The faith I was born into formed me.

the heart of religion is not altered states but altered traits of character. For me, then, the test of a substance's religious worth or validity is not what kind of far-out experience it can produce, but is the life improved by its use? That's the test. Now, on that score, if you remove the "religious cocoon," the experiences don't seem to have much in the way of discernible, traceable effects.

The Sufis say there are three ways to know fire - by hearing it described, by seeing it, or by being burned.

We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master. Taking inward distance, we thus become the authors of our own dramas rather than characters in them.

One reason education undoes belief is its teaching of evolution; Darwin's own drift from orthodoxy to agnosticism was symptomatic. Martin Lings is probably right in saying that more cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution ... than to anything else.

Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.