Distrust futurists. More so if they haven't created anything fundamental in their field. Distrust completely if they claim many fields.

By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.

All religions fall far short of their own ideals.

If they think that an artist can destroy their faith, then their faith is rather fragile.

Religious structure often dilutes the spiritual experience.

One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.

The most obvious failure of organized religions is surely that almost all of them have made a mockery of what their founders taught.

Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.

Too many theorists have a tendency to ignore facts that contradict their convictions.

It is here that almost all religions go wrong. Their priests try to make us believe that they know more about the unseen world than those whose eyes are still blinded by the seen, can ever know--forgetting that while to deny the existence of an unseen kingdom is bad, to pretend that we know more about it than its bare existence is no better.

The spectacle of what religions have been in the past, of what certain religions still are to-day, is indeed humiliating for human intelligence. What a farrago of error and folly!'

Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.