Libraries are public treasuries. They're ways in which well-meaning societies leave the wealth of the past arranged A to Z so that anyone walking past can find it.

Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue. Yet emotions are also our indispensable tool for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn't susceptible to proof or disproof, that isn't checkable against the physical universe.

What we need in Europe is to push back against the idea that religion is so farfetched that it's not worth talking about.

There have been low moments before, but Christianity is an incredibly adaptable organism, using different parts of its repertoire to mutate into new ecological niches, yet preserving intact its story of grace, of love improbably triumphant.

It's hard to focus on a fight when your heart is broken and you're not happy in your relationship, especially if that's your coach. That's like fighting without one leg.

I don't like this romanticization of Indian people in which Indian people are looked at as spiritual saviors, as people who have always taken care of the land. We're human beings. But I think different cultures have developed different aspects of humanness.

If you observe children with sufficient objectivity as they grow into the world, then you will perceive that children's temporal bodies are still not fully connected with the spirit-soul. The task of education, understood in a spiritual sense, is to bring the soul-spirit into harmony with the temporal body.

At a certain point in one's career, it's really wonderful when your child turns around and goes, 'Oh my God, Mommy, you have to be in that film. My friends are going to die.'