Life From Religion

To live among ordinary men and yet to be alone with God, to speak profane language and yet draw the strength to live from the source of existence, from the "upper root" of the soul — it is a paradox which only the mystical devotee is able to realize in his life and which makes him the center of the community of men.
— Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, p. 343.

Scripture is like a man and has flesh [according to the literal meaning], soul [according to the allegorical interpretation] and spirit [in accordance with the mystery].
— Origen, De principiis, IV, 2, 4, p. 312, in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, Gershom Scholem, footnote on p. 46.

Those who have painted pictures of an organized heaven have, implicitly or otherwise, appealed to the esthetic sense in man to try to gain ascent to their plans. We know now that a completely planned heaven is either impossible or unbearable. We know that it is not true that design can come only out of planning. Out of luxuriant waste, winnowed by selection, come designs more beautiful and in greater variety than ever man could plan. This is the lesson of nature that Darwin has spelled out for us. Man, now that he makes himself, cannot do better than to emulate nature's example in allowing for waste and encouraging novelty. There is a grandeur in this new view of life as a complex of adjustive systems that produce adaptiveness without foresight, design without planning and progress without dictation. From the simplest means, man, now master of his own fate, may evolve societies of a variety and novelty — yes, and even of beauty — that no man living can now foresee.
— Garret Hardin, "Nature and Man's Fate," in The Mystery of Matter, L. B. Young (ed.), p. 577.

When I am in doubt as to whom I love more, those who resist or those who surrender, I know that they are one and the same. One thing is certain, God does not want us to come to Him in innocence. We are to know sin and evil, we are to stray from the path, to get lost, to become defiant and desperate: we are to resist, in order that the surrender be complete and abject. It is our privilege as free spirits to elect for God with eyes wide-open, with hearts brimming over, with a desire that outweighs all desires. The innocent one! God has no use for him. He is the one who "plays at Paradise for eternity." To become ever more conscious, ever more gravid with knowledge, to become more and more burdened with guilt — that is man's privilege. No man is free of guilt; to whatever level one attains one is beset with new responsibilities, new sins. In destroying man's innocence God converted man into a potential ally. Through reason and will He gave him the power of choice. And man in his wisdom always chooses God.
— Henry Miller, Time of the Assassins, pp. 110-111.

I suppose any writer who transcends conventional literature is religious in so far as he does transcend it. That is why you can never actually base an educational system on the "Hundred Best Books." A hundred of the truest insights into life as it is would destroy any educational system and its society along with it.
— Henry Miller, Nights of Love and Laughter, p. 12.