“We are nearly always longing for an easy religion, easy to understand and easy to follow; a religion with no mystery, no insoluble problems,no snags; a religion that would allow us to escape from our miserable human condition; a religion in which contact with God spares us all strife, all uncertainty,all suffering and all doubt; in short, a religion without a cross”

“Religion would have us believe that immortality is reserved for the gods. We remain skeptical.”

“...all religions seek to approach the reality of God through symbols, and these symbols point to the mystery of human life, pushing us beyond ourselves, beyond our limits...there is a danger of stopping short at the sign, which will then become a wall which separates us from truth.”

“A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all—and more amusing.”

“Now, we shall be able to judge the extent of the spiritual undernourishment if we look at all these movements from another angle: not as errors but rather as attempts to find healing. I use this comparison: For a long time medical men combated fever as if it itself constituted the illness. Medicine today inclines rather to respect it, not only as a symptom of the disease but of the struggle of the organism against the disease. True, it is this struggle which makes it ill, and yet this very struggle is also the proof of its vitality and is the necessary way to healing.”

“There is yet another class that, having found that their own religion not only prevents free thinking but that some of its philosophies are also against some basic social, economic and scientific concepts of life as required by the progressive society, comes to the illogical conclusion that all religions similarly thwart the growth of progressive societies... Such people fall easy prey to materialism and denounce all religions without having any definite idea of any religion at all.”

“Listen to all the conversations of our world, between nations as well as between individuals. They are, for the most part, dialogues of the deaf.”