A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble, comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow and does not last. Do you fix your eyes on such a one?

— Job 14:1-3a NRSV

The grand premise of religion is that man is able to surpass himself; that man who is part of this world may enter into relationship with Him who is greater than the world; that man may lift up his mind and be attached to the absolute … How does one rise above the horizon of the mind? How does one find a way in this world that would lead to an awareness of Him who is beyond this world? It is an act of profound significance that we sense more than we can say … concepts are second thoughts. All conceptualization is symbolization, an act of accommodation of reality to the human mind.

— Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

I believe that Christ was a man like ourselves; to look upon him as God would seem to me the greatest of sacrileges and an evidence of paganism.

— Leo Tolstoy

Paulinism has always stood on the brink of heresy.

— Karl Barth

It may be said that myths give to the transcendent reality an immanent, this-worldly objectivity. Myths speak about gods and demons as powers on which man knows himself to be dependent, powers whose favors he needs, powers whose wrath he fears. Myths express the knowledge that man is not master of the world and his life, that the world within which he lives is full of riddles and mysteries and that human life also is full of riddles and mysteries.

— Rudolf Bultmann

It is time that Christians were judged more by their likeness to Christ than their notions of Christ.

— Lucretia Mott, Quaker abolitionist and women’s rights advocate (1793-1880)

I am powerless, and my life is unmanageable, but a power greater than myself can restore me if I only let go.

— AA Twelve steps (paraphrase)

The vaporings of a shoddy aesthete without talent … I know I’ve got a gold mine here if I could only write it down … The artist is religious man.

— Thomas Wolfe

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.

— Sinclair Lewis

The book to read is not one which thinks for you, but the one that makes you think. No other book in the world equals the Bible for that.

— James McCosh

The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any other book that ever existed.

— Thomas Paine