
Sam Harris, Reply to a Christian http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=sharris_26_4 (May 2006)
2000s
Source: 2000s, Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), p. 23
Sam Harris, Reply to a Christian http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=sharris_26_4 (May 2006)
2000s
Source: An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973), p. 47
Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.96 (Unnamed * “scholarly writer”: London Times. December 4, 1954)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 422.
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), IV : The Essence of Catholicism
Context: And why be scandalized by the infallibility of a man, of the Pope? What difference does it make whether it be a book that is infallible — the Bible, or a society of men — the Church, or a single man? Does it make any essential change in the rational difficulty? And since the infallibility of a book or of a society of men is not more rational than that of a single man, this supreme offense to the eyes of reason has to be postulated.
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVII
Context: Who shall compose the Bible of human desire, the terrible and simple Bible of that which drives us from life to life, the Bible of our doings, our goings, our original fall? Who will dare to tell everything, who will have the genius to see everything?
I believe in a lofty form of poetry, in the work in which beauty will be mingled with beliefs. The more incapable of it I feel myself, the more I believe it to be possible. The sad splendour with which certain memories of mine overwhelm me, shows me that it is possible. Sometimes I myself have been sublime, I myself have been a masterpiece. Sometimes my visions have been mingled with a thrill of evidence so strong and so creative that the whole room has quivered with it like a forest, and there have been moments, in truth, when the silence cried out.
But I have stolen all this, and I have profited by it, thanks to the shamelessness of the truth revealed. At the point in space in which, by accident, I found myself, I had only to open my eyes and to stretch out my mendicant hands to accomplish more than a dream, to accomplish almost a work.
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 32.