“When we have done our best, we also have to learn that we still need to rely on God. Our best – no matter how good – is incomplete if we leave God out of the picture.”

“We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude....”

“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”

“… our maturation has consisted in the gradual realization that, if we can rely on one another, we need not rely on anything else. In religious terms, this is the Feuerbachian thesis that God is just a projection of the best, and sometimes the worst, of humanity. In philosophical terms, it is the thesis that anything that talk of objectivity can do to make our practices intelligible can be done equally well by talk of intersubjectivity.”

“God knows that we should not despise anything. We must do our best.”

“…our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.”

“We should always choose our books as God chooses our friends, just a bit beyond us, so that we have to do our level best to keep up with them.”

“God, the devil, good, evil, it's all in our heads, not in Heaven or Hell, which we also invented. We do not realize that, having invented God, we immediately became His slaves.”

“In the end what matters is not how good we are but how good God is. Not how much we love Him but how much He loves us. And God loves us whoever we are, whatever we’ve done or failed to do, whatever we believe or can’t.”

“God has promised to supply our needs. What we don’t have now we don’t need now.”