Every Single One Of The Major World

Compassion Is Not Feeling Sorry For Others. It's Not Soft. It Requires An Intellectual Effort.

After A Time I Found That I Could Almost Listen To The Silence, Which Had A Dimension All Of Its Own. I Started To Attend To Its Strange And Beautiful Texture, Which Of Course, It Was Impossible To Express In Words. I Discovered That I Felt At Home And Alive In The Silence, Which Compelled Me To Enter My Interior World And Around There. Without The Distraction Of Constant Conversation, The Words On The Page Began To Speak Directly To My Inner Self. They Were No Long Expressing Ideas That Were Simply Interesting Intellectually, But Were Talking Directly To My Own Yearning And Perplexity.

Ever Since The Crusades, When Christians From Western Europe Were Fighting Holy Wars Against Muslims In The Near East, Western People Have Often Perceived Islam As A Violent And Intolerant Faith - Even Though When This Prejudice Took Root Islam Had A Better Record Of Tolerance Than Christianity.

We Constantly Have Ideas And Experiences That Go Beyond What We Can Say Or Know. Most Often These Are Expressed In Art, In Painting, In Music. Music, Everyday Confronts Us With A Form Of Knowing That Doesn't Depend On Words.

Now I Think One Of The Reasons Why Religion Developed In The Way That It Did Over The Centuries Was Precisely To Curb This Murderous Bent That We Have As Human Beings.