If the devil doesn't exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

The hierarchy of power is not the same as the hierarchy of value. A good human is higher than the animals on both scales; an evil human is high on the scale of power, but at the very bottom of the scale of values.

Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue. But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time.

To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know; it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think.

To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.

I don't think I had even begun to have an idea where I was going, but wherever it was, that was where I wanted to go.