“Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience.”

“The reason the very concept of God has become at once so impoverished, so thoroughly mythical, and ultimately so incredible for so many modern persons is not because of all the interesting things w...”

“Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to ab...”

“I do not mean that there is anything intellectually contemptible in being formally "godless" -- that is, in rejecting all religious dogmas and in refusing to believe in the God those dogmas describ...”

“What makes todays popular atheism so depressing is neither its conceptual boorishness nor its self-righteousness but simply its cultural inevitability. It is the final, predictable, and unsurprisin...”

“What makes today’s popular atheism so depressing is neither its conceptual boorishness nor its self-righteousness but simply its cultural inevitability. It is the final, predictable, and unsurprisi...”

“The world outside is a strange, but relentless mirror.”

“...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.”

“...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases. ”

“I have little use for religion as it is practiced, or for astrology, or for belief in witchcraft or omens of good or ill-luck. I think they all stem from some insufficiency in mens minds, perhaps f...”

“It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent.”

“So if you can look at all things without allowing pleasure to creep in - at a face, a bird, the colour of a sari, the beauty of a sheet of water shimmering in the sun, or anything that gives deligh...”

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettie...”

“To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth. ”

“The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.”