...the only thing that continues is the consequences of our action.

God has to speak to each person in their own language, in their own idioms. Take Spanish, Chinese. You can express the same thought, but to different people you have to use a different language. Its the same in religion.

Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion... religion is institutionalized spirituality.

If you are drilling for water, it's better to drill one 60-foot well than 10 6-foot wells.

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.

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.

...like a magnetic compass turning north, I always tried to head in the direction of the better, which is the direction to God. ...the directions that appeared to lead away from Christianity led me deeper into it.