"Realizing that our job is to help others find the way is half the job."
"Scrape the surface of language and you will behold interstellar space and the skin that encloses it."
"The act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope."
"Often I think that however much I draw or paint, or however well, I am not an artist as art is generally understood. The abstract is meaningless to me save as a fragment of the whole, which is life itself... It is the ultimate which concerns me, and all physical, all material things are but an expression of it... We are part and parcel of the big plan of things. We are simply instruments recording in different measure our particular portion of the infinite. And what we absorb of it makes for character, and what we give forth, for expression."
"It is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder."
“[Science] is like the innumerable showering drops of the waterfall, which, constantly changing, never rest for an instant; [art] is like the rainbow, quietly resting on this raging torrent.”
"Life has taught us that love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction."
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
“The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love... (W)e are reminded that human nature, like nature herself, can hold opposites together as paradoxes, resulting in a more capacious and generous life.”
"The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions of other men!"
"To leave the world richer—that is the ultimate success."
"I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself… It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can… The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago that he has forgotten… I write as one amateur to another, talking about difficulties I have met, or lights I have gained…"
"Hold on to your anger, and use it as compost for your garden."
“Your kids… They don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
"Science investigates, religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power, religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts, religion deals with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary. Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism."
“My objection to fundamentalism is not that they are fundamentalists but that essentially they want me to be a fundamentalist, too. Now, they may say that I believe evolution is true and I want everyone to believe that evolution is true. But I don’t want everyone to believe that evolution is true, I want them to study what we say about evolution and to decide for themselves. Fundamentalists say they want to treat creationism on an equal basis. But they can’t. It’s not a science. You can teach creationism in churches and in courses on religion. They would be horrified if I were to suggest that in churches they should teach secular humanism as an alternate way of looking at the universe or evolution as an alternate way of considering how life may have started. In the church they teach only what they believe, and rightly so, I suppose. But on the other hand, in schools, in science courses, we’ve got to teach what scientists think is the way the universe works.”
“If you perceive the universe as being a universe of abundance, then it will be. If you think of the universe as one of scarcity, then it will be.”
“We find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness and growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil, we’ll likely find them, and we may get taken over by them.”
The word "religion" points to that area of human experience where one way or another we come upon Mystery as a summons to pilgrimage; where we sense beyond and beneath the realities of every day a Reality no less real because it can only be hinted at in myths and rituals; where we glimpse a destination that we can never fully know until we reach it.
Since the Reality that religion claims to deal with is beyond space and time, we cannot use normal space-and-time language (i.e. nouns and verbs) to describe it directly. We must fall back on the language of metaphor and resign ourselves to describing it at best indirectly.
It is obvious that this is what we are doing when we say Jesus is the "Son of God," or the Lord is our "shepherd," or the Kingdom of God is "within you." It is not so obvious that this is what we are doing—but we are doing it no less—when we say, "God exists." This does not mean that God "exists" literally as you and I do—that is, exists now and not then, here and not there, and stands out of (ex + sistere) some prior reality. It is at best a crude metaphor.
To say that God "does not exist" may be a better metaphor to suggest the nature of God's reality. But since it also is bound to be taken literally, it is better not to say it.