"Any modern person, believer or atheist, can feel this way (i. e., that the universe is meaningless). The believer, to take some comfort and to find some solace, allows his brain to perpetrate a trick that it is quite willing to play: to conjure a god and a more pleasant universe. So he turns to religion, even if to find that solace he must ignore his religion’s monstrous contradictions, swallow his doubts, smile at ludicrous claims and accept that he has transformed a metaphor into a pseudo-reality. Before the advent of modern science and the last four hundred years of increased knowledge, believers may have believed in some seamless way, uninterrupted by doubts. Now every sensible, educated, modern believer knows in a corner of consciousness that she is buying her solace on the cheap—she knows that the pope is not infallible, that god did not give the Jews a piece of land, that there is nothing like nirvana, and so on. So she bites her tongue and tries to get as much out of her religion as she can, covering her eyes to all the rest—and not really dealing with the central issue of cosmic indifference."

"We need atheism to grow as a movement because we need to remove the god card from the hands of the selfishly self-interested."

"Every time that we say that God is the author of some phenomenon, that signifies that we are ignorant of how such a phenomenon was caused by the forces of nature."

"There are so many believers with good hearts! But that doesn’t make their belief systems any less faulty or, ultimately, dangerous."

"You are free to cut off contact with toxic people and to eliminate toxic beliefs from your system."

"The god religions, the river religions, and the world of supernatural enthusiasms do not serve you. They force you to rein in your intelligence, they make claims that you do not honestly believe, they smell of illegitimate shortcut, and they hurt your chances of taking a fearless inventory of your beliefs and charting a course that will make you proud."

"The atheist’s way is your way. You will take your journey, and it will not be identical to my journey."

"There are no gods (including God). Like all species, ours is a product of nature. This is not something either to celebrate or to mourn. But it can prove a transformational and mind-opening experience to put all gods, religions and supernatural enthusiasms aside and to explore the world from the point of view of a human being who lives, dies, and is as natural as a tiger or a dove."

"Not only is the atheist way more accurate and more truthful than the god-talk way, but it also confers great advantages. The first is that you feel very free. You are free to think your own thoughts and to have your own feelings. If a passing pastor accuses you of sinning, you feel free to rebuke or ignore him. You know that he has no special knowledge and that he is only betraying your common humanity by quoting gods. You know that no one has any special knowledge about the purpose or lack of purpose of the universe, that there is only scientific knowledge, with its limitations; the speculations of consciousness, with its limitations; and some amount of mystery, shared by us all and quite likely to remain unexplained until the end of time."

"That is what is in our hearts when we conclude that the universe is meaningless. We don’t doubt that it has order, but we recognize that it is not our parent, our sponsor, or our caretaker."

"As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect."

"This looks to be a moment when atheism is capturing the imagination of many millions of people. At exactly the same time, fundamental religious belief is growing unchecked. These two events are likely intimately related, as rational people are frightened back to their rationality by fundamentalism and believers dig in harder against liberty, justice, and reason."

"They are alive, but they are not engaged in the project of their own lives. No one has ever taught them otherwise. Why aren’t we offered any existential training? Because one of society’s unacknowledged goals is to minimize existential thought. A company making widgets doesn’t want you to wonder about the meaningfulness of its widget. It wants you to be attracted by the widget’s design and to buy two of them."

"Want a guarantee? Join another species. Our species just makes decisions."

"Would you rather be right or free?"

"The perfect world is created when the mind is free to see it."

"In my experience, it takes only one person to have a successful relationship, and that's me."

"No one has ever been angry at another human being—we’re only angry at our story of them."

"I could find only three kinds of business in the world—mine, yours, and God’s. Whose business are you in?"

"Just keep coming home to yourself. You are the one you’ve been waiting for."

"Don't be careful. You could hurt yourself."

"Reality is always the story of a past, and what I love about the past is—it’s over."

"If you want to see the love of your life, look in the mirror."

"We suffer only until we realize that we can’t know anything."

"We say to others only what we need to hear."

"Have you asked you?"

"Nothing you believe is true. To know this is freedom."

"You can only see what you believe—nothing else is possible."

"Defense is the first act of war."

"There are no physical problems—only mental ones."

"Until we know that death is equal to life, we live in fear."

"We never make a decision. When the time is right, the decision makes itself."

"Everyone and everything is doing its job perfectly—no mistake."

"The teacher you need is the person you’re living with."

"Ultimately, I am all I can know."

"The miracle of love comes to us in the presence of the uninterpreted moment."

"There are no new stressful thoughts. They’re all recycled."

"Thoughts aren’t personal. They just appear, like raindrops. Would you argue with a raindrop?"

"Stress is an alarm clock that lets you know you’ve attached to something not true for you."

"What is is. You don’t get a vote. Haven’t you noticed?"

"“I don’t know” is my favorite position."

"Until you look forward to criticism, your Work’s not done."

"We do only three things in life: we sit, we stand, we lie horizontal. The rest is just a story."

"The last story: God is everything, God is good."

"Personalities don’t love—they want something."

"For me, reality is God, because it rules."

"You are what exists before all stories. You are what remains when the story is understood."

"Gratitude is what we are without a story."

"I don’t let go of concepts—I question them. Then they let go of me."