To be with God is really to be involved in some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it - the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress - from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky.

Hatred destroys the person who hates.

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death-- ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.