Quotes from Simon May

The only 'natural enemies' are those who take one's very nature as an offence.

Failure is life's magnifying glass.

Human love, now even more than then, is widely tasked with achieving what once only divine love was thought capable of: to be our ultimate source of meaning and happiness, and of power over suffering and disappointment.

This is how all love works. Like Israel's love for God, love does not need deep knowledge of the other to be evoked and sustained-- through, once inspired, it might seek such knowledge. Love is evoked not by beauty or moral goodness (in the sense of kindness) but by the mysterious promise of the loved one to anchor and sustain one's life, such that one can feel at home in the world. Love can never count on requital or justice- and it is perhaps most genuinely love if it doesn't.

The religion of love is no less attractive to the diehard atheist than to the agnostic or the believer. Many atheists find in love a taste of the absolute and the eternal that they rigorously deny to any other realm of life.