“If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of man serve its own interests.”

“It's important that you identify what the best things are in your life. The things that do more than just get you through the day. The things that make you want the next day to come. And once you identify those things, it's critical that you nurture them and keep them strong.”

“Every now and then I think it might be nice to be so ignorant as to see the world black and white. Then I remember how brilliant all the other colors are and thank God for creating them.”

“Since then, I've had these little periods when everything seems okay. I had another one last night, which I guess is why I'm writing you about this now. It's not that I don't understand that life has to continue, and it's not that I thought that there would never be a point when I could laugh easily or simply have a good time again. But these feelings don't last and they still seem unnatural to me. Not when I have them - at that point, they seem amazingly natural - but afterward. If you and I were going through this together, I'm sure we would talk about that a lot. I'd like to believe we would help each other out, that we would get through this together.”

“All errour is prejudicial: it is by deceiving himself that man is plunged in misery. He neglected Nature; he understood not her laws; he formed gods of the most preposterous kinds: these became the sole objects of his hope, the creatures of his fear, and he trembled under these visionary deities; under the supposed influence of imaginary beings created by himself; under the terrour inspired by blocks of stone; by logs of wood; by flying fish; or else under the frowns of men, mortal as himself, whom his distempered fancy had elevated above that Nature of which alone he is capable of forming any idea.”

“Let education kindle only those which are truly beneficialto the human species; let it favour those alone which are really necessary to the maintenance of society. The passions of man are dangerous, only because every thing conspires to give them an evil direction.”

“I remember sitting in the Beth Shalom synagogue in Cambridge on the night of Kol Nidre. Peter Lipton, a friend and an atheist philosopher, was giving a sermon on the theme of “atonement:” “If we treat another person as essentially bad, we dehumanize him or her. If we take the view that every human being has some good in them, even if it is only 0.1 percent of their makeup, then by focusing on their good part, we humanize them. By acknowledging and attending to and rewarding their good part, we allow it to grow, like a small flower in a desert.”