Here is a selection of my favorite quotes. They may or may not define any one part of my world view. Take them with a grain of salt … or a grain of gold.

On Ethics

Live never to be ashamed if anything you do or say is published around the world—even if what is published is not true.
—Richard Bach

Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you do with them is up to you.
—Richard Bach

Why not let people differ about their answers to the great mysteries of the Universe? Let each seek one’s own way to the highest, to one’s own sense of supreme loyalty in life, one’s ideal of life. Let each philosophy, each world-view bring forth its truth and beauty to a larger perspective, that people may grow in vision, stature and dedication.
—Algernon Black

Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds.
—Buddha

I was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, or course, stop to kick a pedestrian who has already been hit. From which it followed, of course, that one would never ever—on pain of deletion from dozens of Christmas card lists across the country—vote Republican.
—Barbara Ehrenreich

The cosmos is neither moral or immoral; only people are. He who would move the world must first move himself.
—Edward Ericson

Being a practical liar doesn’t mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it’s that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.
—The Golden Compass

Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.
—Albert Schweitzer

On Family

The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.
—Richard Bach

Family life is full of major and minor crises—the ups and downs of health, success and failure in career, marriage, and divorce—and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality. It’s difficult to imagine anything more nourishing to the soul.
—Thomas Moore

On Knowledge

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the butterfly calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
—Richard Bach

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.
—Aleister Crowley

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
—Carl Jung

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
—Immanuel Kant

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
—Anais Nin

On Life and Death

Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less-advanced life-forms, and they’ll call you crazy.
—Richard Bach

Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.
—Richard Bach

Life and death, energy and peace. If I stop today it was still worth it. Even the terrible mistakes that I made and would have unmade if I could. The pains that have burned me and scarred my soul, it was worth it, for having been allowed to walk where I’ve walked, which was to hell on earth, heaven on earth, back again, into, under, far in between, through it, in it, and above.
—Gia Carangi

Only when we consciously attain to the enjoyment of life as a sacrament, only when the universe is understood as being a vast replica of our own nature, do we accept the cross, and hail death as the culmination and prize of life.
—Aleister Crowley

True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul, with all one’s goodness and righteousness.
—Albert Einstein

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
—Anais Nin

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
—Anais Nin

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
—Anais Nin

On Myth

If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.
—Richard Bach

It is a myth, not a mandate, a fable not a logic, and symbol rather than a reason by which men are moved.
—Irwin Edman

Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.
—D.H. Lawrence

The depth of your mythology is the extent of your effectiveness.
—John C Maxwell

Myth has four functions: “creating a landscape of allusion, enabling us to understand our own and other cultures from the inside out, providing an adaptable tool of therapy, and stating in symbolic or metaphoric terms the abstract truths of our common human existence.”
—Jane Yolen

On Spirituality

The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear.
—Felix Adler

Since once more, my Lord … I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I shall rise beyond symbols to the pure majesty of the real, and I shall offer you, I your priest, on the altar of the whole earth, the toil and the sorrow of the world.
—Teilhard de Chardin

Each of us has a Will of eternal import, necessarily related to everything that exists, and all our conscious desires are so many masks—one fixed expression concealing our infinite variety.
—Aleister Crowley

There is a fourth kind of atheist, not really an atheist at all. He is but a traveller in the Land of No God, and knows that it is but a stage on his journey—and a stage, moreover, not far from the goal….This atheist, not in-being but in-passing, is … tired of theories and systems of theology and all such toys; and being weary and anhungred and athirst seeks a seat at the Table of Adepts, and a portion of the Bread of Spiritual Experience, and a draught of the wine of Ecstasy.
—Aleister Crowley

Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
—Albert Einstein

The name of infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of our being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about Him.
—Paul Tillich