Reza Aslan Quotes

The Taj Mahal can be a tourist attraction, an architectural marvel, but it can never be treated as a monument of faith. After all, there is a difference between tourism and faith.

The Bible is clear that God considers 40 days a spiritually significant time period. Whenever God wanted to prepare someone for his purposes, he took 40 days.

The Hindu religion appears ... as a cathedral temple, half in ruins, noble in the mass, often fantastic in detail but always fantastic with a significance crumbling or badly outworn in places, but a cathedral temple in which service is still done to the Unseen and its real presence can be felt by those who enter with the right spirit.

Stories matter. Many stories matter.

If you just read Joseph Campbell, who has written amazing books on mythology and religion, they all do come together at some point. There are some of the greatest stories that there have ever been in the Bible. All you have to do is read the book of Maccabi, it's like a film script.

If you look back at my story, it doesn’t matter where you look, but God’s fingerprints are all over the place.

For me, the greater purpose of the story is just to illuminate some pattern of human truth.

A cloud of incense was rising on high; the people suddenly all bowed low; what could it mean? The truth flashed on him, fearfully yet sweetly; it was the Blessed Sacrament - it was the Lord Incarnate who was on the altar, who had come to visit and bless his people. It was the Great Presence, which makes a Catholic Church different from every other place in the world; which makes it, as no other place can be - holy.

Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.

Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.

One thing I must tell you. Idolatry in India does not mean anything horrible. It is not the mother of harlots.

The banyan tree does not mean awakening, nor does the hill, nor the saint, nor the European couple. The lotus is a symbol of regeneration.

The hinge of history is on the door of a Bethlehem stable.

I'm just trying to matter and live a good life and make work that means something to somebody.

I write to find out what the story means to me, that is what I try to do especially with the first draft.

It is important that you say what you mean to say. Time is too short. You must speak the words that matter.

A good story is alive, ever changing and growing as it meets each listener or reader in a spirited and unique encounter, while the moralistic tale is not only dead on arrival, it's already been embalmed. It's safer that way. When a lively story goes dancing out to meet the imagination of a child, the teller loses control over meaning. The child gets to decide what the story means.

Music is a fair and glorious gift of God. I am strongly persuaded that after theology, there is no art which can be placed on the level with music.

The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.

Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what's common in human experience and turns it into something holy.

Because here’s the thing: No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be.

In one of the accounts of Jesus's death we read that the curtain in the temple of God-the one that kept people out of the holiest place of God's presence-ripped.One New Testament writer said that this ripping was a picture of how, because of Jesus, we can have new, direct access to God.A beautiful idea.But the curtain ripping also means that God comes out, that God is no longer confined to the temple as God was previously.

No matter how good a story is, if you're at a newsstand and you see a lot of comic books, you don't know how good the story is unless you read it. But you can spot the artwork instantly, and you know whether you like the artwork, whether it grabs you or not.

I have had to make a cross of two logs, and lie down on it, to show the Indians what it means to crucify a man.

Even though I have never had an abrupt conversion experience, religion has been real to me and closely knitted to life. In fact the two cannot be separated; religion for me is life.