Daily Digest

“Great minds are always feared by lesser minds.”

“Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand.”

“I don't read horror, ever. When I was 15, I made the mistake of reading part of 'The Exorcist.' It was the first and last horror book I've ever opened.”

“I was already writing 'The Lost Symbol' when I started to realize 'The Da Vinci Code' would be big. The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who's had success is that I temporarily became very self-aware.”

“Small minds have always lashed out at what they don't understand.”

“Transhumanism is the ethics and science of using things like biological and genetic engineering to transform our bodies and make us a more powerful species.”

“Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.”

“Religion is flawed, but only because man is flawed.”

“To efficiently create chaos, Langdon realized, requires some order.”

“God answers all prayers, but sometimes his answer is 'no'.”

“The more science I studied, the more I saw that physics becomes metaphysics and numbers become imaginary numbers. The farther you go into science, the mushier the ground gets. You start to say, 'Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science.'”

“I'm constantly trying to keep people guessing as to what I'm doing, and I will spend enormous amounts of time looking at manuscripts and asking questions, and people will say, 'I know what his next book is about.'”

“I have written a lot about the fine arts, but I'd never written about the literary arts, and so on some level Dante really, you know, spoke to me, as new ground but also familiar ground.”

“The only difference between you and God is that you have forgotten you are divine.”

“Forgiveness is God's greatest gift”

“Darkness feeds on apathy.”

“I love the gray area between right and wrong.”

“Religion is like language or dress. We gravitate toward the practices with which we were raised. In the end, though, we are all proclaiming the same thing. That life has meaning. That we are grateful for the power that created us.”

“For me, a good thriller must teach me something about the real world. Thrillers like 'Coma,' 'The Hunt for Red October' and 'The Firm' all captivated me by providing glimpses into realms about which I knew very little - medical science, submarine technology and the law.”

“God is found in the collection of Many. . . rather than in the One.”

“Truth has power. And if we all gravitate toward similar ideas, maybe we do so because those ideas are true...written deep within us. And when we hear the truth, even if we don't understand it, we feel that truth resonate within us...vibrating with our unconscious wisdom. Perhaps the truth is not learned by us, but rather, the truth is re-called...re-membered...-re-cognized...as that which is already inside us.”

“Since the beginning of time, spirituality and religion have been called to fill in the gaps that science did not understand.”

“The laws of physics is the canvas God laid down on which to paint his masterpiece”

“The thing that's going to make artificial intelligence so powerful is its ability to learn, and the way AI learns is to look at human culture.”

“Science tells me God must exist. My mind tells me I'll never understand God. My heart tells me I'm not meant to. [Vittoria Vetra]”

“When his brain died, all of the memories held in his gray matter, along with all of the knowledge he had acquired, would simply evaporate in a flood of chemical reactions.”

“For centuries the church has stood by while science picked away at religion bit by bit. Debunking miracles. Training the mind to overcome the heart. Condemning religion as the opiate of the masses. They denounce God as a hallucination - a delusional crutch for those too weak to accept that life is meaningless. I could not stand by while science presumed to harness the power of God himself! Proof, you say? Yes, proof of science's ignorance! What is wrong with the admission that something exists beyond our understanding? The day science substantiates God in a lab is the day people stop needing faith!”

“Learning the truth has become my life's love.”

“I read nonfiction almost exclusively - both for research and also for pleasure. When I read fiction, it's almost always in the thriller genre, and it needs to rivet me in the opening few chapters.”

“Two thousand years ago, we lived in a world of Gods and Goddesses. Today, we live in a world solely of Gods. Women in most cultures have been stripped of their spiritual power.”

“When I was a kid, the miracles of my life were the Resurrection, a candlelight service on New Year's Eve, the Virgin Birth, and the Three Wise Men.”

“The power of human thought grows exponentially with the number of minds that share that thought.”

“Futurists don't consider overpopulation one of the issues of the future. They consider it the issue of the future.”

“It's kind of a catch-22 now because since the 'Da Vinci Code,' I have access to places and people that I didn't have access to before, so that's a lot of fun for somebody like me, but I'm always trying to keep a secret. I don't want people to know what I'm writing about.”

“Human intellect has always evolved by rejecting outdated information in favor of new truths. This is how the species has evolved. In Darwinian terms, a religion that ignores scientific facts and refuses to change its beliefs is like a fish stranded in a slowly drying pond and refusing to flip to deeper water because it doesn't want to believe its world has changed.”

“It seemed there was always a close correlation between true believers and high body counts.”

“I grew up in a very religious household. My mom was a church organist. I was a religious kid.”

“I'm not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.”

“My sincere hope is that 'The Da Vinci Code,' in addition to entertaining people, will serve as an open door to begin their own explorations.”

“Everything is possible. The impossible just takes longer.”

“I've always been captivated by the Voynich Manuscript - the mysterious, 15th-century encrypted codex that still baffles cryptologists, linguists, and historians.”

“Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding it are arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some of us go to Mecca, some of us study subatomic particles. In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.”

“I have great admiration for the fact-checking team. Considering it takes me years to gather all the facts in my books, it's a daunting task for the fact-checkers to review all of that material in a matter of weeks.”

“Washington, D.C., has everything that Rome, Paris and London have in the way of great architecture - great power bases. Washington has obelisks and pyramids and underground tunnels and great art and a whole shadow world that we really don't see.”

“Knowledge is a tool, and like all tools, its impact is in the hands of the user.”

“Science may have alleviated the miseries of disease and drudgery and provided an array of gadgetry for our entertainment and convenience, but it has left us in a world without wonder. Our sunsets have been reduced to wavelengths and frequencies. The complexities of the universe have been shredded into mathematical equations. Even our self-worth as human beings has been destroyed. Science proclaims that Planet Earth and its inhabitants are a meaningless speck in the grand scheme. A cosmic accident.”

“Writing is a solitary journey, so I am always excited to go out on book tour and meet readers one-on-one.”

“I still get up every morning at 4 A.M. I write seven days a week, including Christmas. And I still face a blank page every morning, and my characters don't really care how many books I've sold.”