“Be patient under all conditions and place your whole trust and confidence in God.”

“The wilderness was the testing ground—the deciding place. It was a place of God revealing himself in a whole new and deeper way. Would his people trust him completely, confident in his goodness, wisdom, and power? Those who believed God to be who he said he was moved on into the promised land; many did not.”

“If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed”

“Before religion got organized, faith in God meant trusting your intuition, your gut instinct, as divine. It meant always letting conscience be your guide. For believers, the whole world was charged with the grandeur of Gods and all of life was sacred. Those were the good old days.”

“Into the hands of common sense I confided the matter. Common sense, however, was as chilled and bewildered as all my other faculties, and it was only under the spur of an inexorable necessity that she spasmodically executed her trust.”

“My confidence was of the hothouse variety, carefully cultivated under highly regulated conditions. One wrong look, one mean comment, and my facade would wither.”