I read the ‚Old Testament‘ all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read ‚The Origin Of Species‘, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.

Each one prays to God according to his own light.

America is not nearly done. We’re only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows… what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants – if they survive that long – will see.

It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.

If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.

The most powerful idea that’s entered the world in the last few thousand years – the idea of grace – is the reason I would like to be a Christian.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

You can have religion with spirituality. You can also have religion without spirituality.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

People often speak of God being even-handed. God is not even-handed. God is biased, in favor of the weak, of the despised.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.

Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

You can be committed to Church but not committed to Christ, but you cannot be committed to Christ and not committed to church.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

People are skeptical of many televangelists, and I’m sensitive to that.

No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before.

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

Unless we place our religion and our treasure in the same thing, religion will always be sacrificed.

Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn’t anticipate.

God to me is love.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock and roll or Christianity.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

Gravitation is, so far, not understandable in terms of other phenomena.

The media need superheroes in science just as in every sphere of life, but there is really a continuous range of abilities with no clear dividing line.

For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel.

I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‚Eureka!‘ but ‚That’s funny…‘

Such is the feebleness of humanity, such is its perversity, that doubtless it is better for it to be subject to all possible superstitions, as long as they are not murderous, than to live without religion.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.

Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.

The study and knowledge of the universe would somehow be lame and defective were no practical results to follow.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.

When we speak of faith – the faith that can move mountains – we are not speaking of faith in general but of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Dance music is no longer a simple Donna Summer beat. It’s become a whole language that I find fascinating and exciting. Eventually, it will lose the dance tag and join the fore of rock.

My mother always used to say, ‚Well, if you had been born a little girl growing up in Egypt, you would go to church or go to worship Allah, but surely if those people are worshipping a God, it must be the same God‘ – that’s what she always said. The same God with different names.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

Sincere Christians can disagree about the details of Scripture and theology – absolutely.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful: they are found because it was possible to find them.

If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

They say the universe is expanding. That should help with the traffic.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it’s just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

I think, for years, people have been pushed down by religion, and I don’t say that disrespectfully, but they’ve been shown a God that you can’t measure up to.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted… but to weigh and consider.

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

In this quest to seek and find God in all things, there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

God doesn’t dwell in the wooden, stony or earthen idols. His abode is in our feelings, our thoughts.

The American doctor, in my opinion, possesses a combination of conservatism and that other quality which has put the United States in the forefront in almost every department of science – that is, an eagerness to know what it is really all about in order that he may not be the one left behind if there is something to it.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.