“For it was only via the idea of God that we were able to develop all our ideas about a unified self, reason, a unified law-governed cosmos, sovereignty, property, supervision (Providence) and management, long-term purposes and action to attain them and so on. God taught us everything, so that we are eternally grateful to God even as we now leave him behind.”

“Religious ideas such as the idea of God have functioned as regulative ideals for us to aspire after: we too could become unified and capable subjects; we too could learn how to know the world and reshape our environment to meet our own needs.”

“We should be empty of clutching, empty of self, empty of all the old ideas of substance. We should be ‘lost in the objectivity of world-love’, as I have elsewhere put it; or, perhaps better, we should let ourselves be only an empty space filled with brightness. Life lived like that is ‘eternal’ life.”

“I am suggesting that we can and do regain eternity when we are so immersed in life, in moral action, or in aesthetic contemplation, that we completely forget about time and anxiety.”

“Nothing out there tells us how we must live: we and we alone can now with confidence knowingly trust our own hearts, and admit that we do and must invent our own ethics.”

“The reason why Jesus got into such severe trouble was that he tried to bring into the present a construction of the world, of God and of the self that belonged to a still-remote future. He was much too far ahead of his time, and suffered accordingly.”

“To love is to be vulnerable: if God loves, then God is mortal.”