Quotes from Jack Miles

Refuse to deny what you know but consent to how little that will always be, and, when the moment comes, the sky will open and the liberating intrusion will descend upon you.

You think you are alone. Then you raise your eyes, and you are surrounded.

Lord can restore a covenant with Israel and yet continue

God is no saint, strange to say. There is much to object to in him, and many attempts have been made to improve him.

Philosophers of religion have sometimes claimed that all gods are projections of the human personality, and so it may be. But if so, we must at least recognize the empirical fact that many human beings, rather than project their own personalities upon gods wholly of their own creation, have chosen to introject - take into themselves - the religious projections of other human personalities.

And yet the writer who first brought monotheism to full formulation and who so clearly felt that this idea was destined to sweep the world was, in point of historical fact, quite correct. The spread of this idea, principally through Christianity and Islam, has not been what he foresaw; and in the diffusion of the idea the Jews have been more often vilified than glorified. Yet Christianity and Islam do understand themselves to worship the same being that Israel first worshiped

I have begun to imagine human knowledge and ignorance as tracing a curve of asymptotic divergence, such that with every increase in knowledge, there occurs a greater increase in ignorance, the result being that our ignorance always exceeds our knowledge, and the gap between the two grows infinitely greater, not smaller, as infinite time passes.

Can a literary character be said to live a life from birth to death or otherwise to undergo a development from beginning to end? Or is a literary character-fixed on the pages of a book, trapped forever in the same few words and actions-the very opposite of a living, developing human being?