“A book exhales a subtle odor of spirituality throughout the place it adorns.”

“She closed the book and put her cheek against it. There was still an odor of a library on it, of dust, leather, binding glue, and old paper, one book carrying the smell of hundreds.”

“Prologue, and a recurring phrase throughout the book.”

“Throughout the Middle Ages the sway of the Church over the moral and spiritual life of the people,”

“"He" should be read as "he or she" throughout the book.”

“Walking the spiritual path properly is a very subtle process; it is not something to jump into naively. There are numerous sidetracks which leades to a distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality; we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques. This fundamental distortion may be referred to as spiritual materialism.”

“There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.”

“I suspect that, living on the moral and spiritual levels on which Christ lived, he must have had temptations so subtle that I should not have had enough spiritual sensitiveness to see them as temptations at all.”

“It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.”

“The deeper the Self-realization of a man, the more he influences the whole universe by his subtle spiritual vibrations, and the less he himself is affected by the phenomenal flux.”