Among the languages of American Indians there is no word for ‘art,’ because for Indians everything is art.

Without attention, the human sense of wonder and the holy will stir occasionally, but to become a steady flame it must be tended

Jesus… invited people to see differently instead of telling them what to do or believe… he located the authority of his teaching in his hearer’s hearts, not in himself or God-as-removed.

To try to extinguish the drive for riches with money is like trying to quench a fire by pouring butter over it.

Buddhism begins with a man who shook off the daze, the doze, the dream-like vagaries of ordinary awareness. It begins with a man who woke up.

Hinduism advises people to think of God as the archetype of the noblest reality they encounter in the natural world.

The only unqualifiedly good is extended vision, the enlargement of one’s understanding of the ultimate nature of things.

Hinduism encourages people to test all four [being reflective, emotional, active, or experimental] and combine them as best suits their needs.

Walnuts have a shell, and they have a kernel. Religions are the same. They have an essence, but then they have a protective coating. So the kernels are the same. However, the shells are different

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

I think that God imploded, like a spiritual big bang, to launch the eight civilizations that make up recorded history and the religions in those civilizations.

I'm not a chauvinist. I'm a universalist.

Sex is the divine in its most available epiphany.

Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are.

The essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.

When I read the Upanishads, which are part of Vedanta, I found a profundity of worldview that made my Christianity seem like third grade.

Having been created in the image God, all human beings have a God-shaped vacuum built into their hearts. Since nature abhors a vacuum, people keep trying to fill the one inside them.

I think it matters almost infinitely that we practice one of the authentic religions. But if you mean does it make any difference which, the answer is no.

We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master [when] we become the authors of our own dramas rather than characters in them.

What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite responsibility to all things future.