What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? I’ll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusory—property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life—don’t be afraid of misfortune… It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides…and prize above all else in the world those who love you and wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it might be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory.

On the whole, religious people fall into two basic categories. First, there are those who want to resolve the mystery of God, to teach and preach it clearly, to spell out the facts as they are believed, to be like a reporting journalist and relay information in black and white to those not in ‘the know.’ On the other hand, there are those who, instead of wanting to resolve the mystery, seek to deepen it. Such people are uneasy with words as ‘simply’ or ‘easily,’ they are willing to get tongue-tied, to say ‘I don’t know,’ to embrace the evocative languages of poetry and music in their search for God. They have come to believe that truth is not the same thing as the elimination of ambiguity.

…and a preacher of the Old Time Gospel Hour… stealing money from the sick, and the old. Well, the God I believe in isn’t short of cash, mister.

Beethoven… turned out pieces of breath-taking rightness. Rightness—that’s the word! When you get the feeling that whatever note succeeds the last is the only possible note that can rightly happen at that instant, in that context, then chances are you’re listening to Beethoven. Melodies, fugues, rhythms—leave them to the Tchaikovskys and Hindemiths and Ravels. Our boy has the real goods, the stuff from Heaven, the power to make you feel at the finish: Something is right in the world. There is something that checks throughout, that follows its own law consistently: something we can trust, that will never let us down.

The 20th Century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence.