“We do not accept a religion because it offers us certain rewards. The only thing that a religion can offer us is to be just what it, in itself, is: a greater meaning in ourselves, in our lives, and in our grasp of the nature of things...a religion exists for us only if, like a piece of poetry, it carries us away. It is not in any sense a 'hypothesis.”

“Reading is accumulating knowledge. But not only that. Reading offers us every day what religion promises us for a posthumous and improbable future: the possibility of living beyond what our lifetime allows us to.”

“All our religion is but a false religion, and all our virtues are mere illusions and we ourselves are only hypocrites in the sight of God, if we have not that universal charity for everyone--for the good, and for the bad, for the poor and for the rich, and for all those who do us harm as much as those who do us good.”

“Religion is the great balm of existence because it takes us outside ourselves, connects us to something larger”

“In the end, it is our defiance that redeems us. If wolves had a religion – if there was a religion of the wolf – that it is what it would tell us.”

“Because we imagine that we are what humanity was divinely destined to become, we assume that our prehistoric ancestors were trying to be us, but just lacked the tools and techniques to succeed. We invest our ancestors with our own predelictions in what seem to us primitive and unevolved forms. As an example of all this, we take it for granted that our religions represent humanity's ultimate and highest spiritual development and expect to find among our ancestors only crude, fumbling harbingers of these religions. We certainly don't expect to find robust, fully developed religions whose expressions are entirely different from ours.”