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.

The larger the island of wisdom, the longer the shoreline of wonder.

In accounting terms, we can say that if Philosophical Taoists work at increasing net profits by cutting costs, Religious Taoists try it by increasing gross income.

That in China the scholar ranked at the top of the social scale may have been Confucius’ doing, but Taoism is fully as responsible for placing the soldier at that bottom.

Confucius stresses social responsibility, Lao Tzu praises spontaneity and naturalness… Confucius roams within society, Lao Tzu wanders beyond.

'Civilization' is seductive where not imperious

Of all the non-Western religions, Islam stands closest to the west—closest geographically, and also closest ideologically; for religiously it stands in the Abrahamic family of religions while philosophically it builds on the Greeks. Yet Islam is the most difficult religion for the West to understand... Common borders have given rise to border disputes... for a good part of the last 1400 years, Islam and Europe have been at war, and people seldom have a fair picture of their enemies.

Bertrand Russell, a scientific humanist, found it difficult to see why people should take unhappily to news that the universe is running down, inasmuch as 'I do not see how an unpleasant process can be made less so by being indefinitely repeated.'

It was under the rubric of magic that the Taoist church—dividing the territory with freelance wizards, exorcists, and shamans—divided ways to harness higher powers for humane ends.

There are books whose first reading casts a spell that is never quite undone, the reason being that they speak to the deepest 'me' in the reader... the Tao Te Ching is such a book.

When gods alike and mortals rose to birth,
A golden race th' immortals for'd on earth
Of many-languaged men: they lived of old
When Saturn reign'd in heaven, an age of gold.

For a man can win nothing better than a good wife, and nothing more painful than a bad one.