“'Civilization' is seductive where not imperious”

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“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.”

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

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“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.'”

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“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.”

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

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“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.”

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

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

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“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.”

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“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.”

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

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“Sex is the divine in its most available epiphany.”

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“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.”

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

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

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

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“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.”

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

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“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”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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

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

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