My Adventures with God Quotes

“malachim, or messengers. Christianity has defined these messengers as what we know as angels. The more ancient interpretation in Judaism is that the malachim could be anything. They could be heavenly spirits. Or not. They could come in the form of ordinary people, donkeys, a flame, or even a breeze.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“Relationships never operate at the level of your greatest strengths. They operate at the level of your greatest weakness. Whoever is unfaithful, whoever is more needy, whoever is late, controls the nature of the friendship. You can swing with it or not, but you can’t count on changing it.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“Knowledge is the ultimate protection against the dark.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“The unraveling of civilization doesn’t require armies or revolutions. All that is required is for one too many people to be looking the wrong way at the wrong time.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“The force that held us together for so many years was something that resembled devotion. Devotion is affection mixed with faith. It’s a substance more durable than reason.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“…I saw that she, that we, had been wrong my entire life. Self-preservation is not the primary instinct. It never was. […] People don’t seek survival. Even if they do, it’s more like an afterthought, like trying to remember to turn into the skid, which is important, but it’s not the primary instinct. The real primary instinct is transcendence. More than safety, more than happiness, we are driven to reach beyond ourselves, even if it means our own destruction.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“It didn’t help that this era honored bad philosophy. […] They came up with slogans like, ‘If you love something, let it go.’ Generally, this is bad advice. If you love something you have to fight for it. Protect it.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“Success brings many things into your life. Usually money. However, to get that money you often have to make many decisions you never made before and make them in a short amount of time. There is a lot of pressure. As a result, you end up replacing friends with advisors. Lawyers and accountants make regular phone calls to see how you are doing. The cost of doing business with them isn’t the first twenty minutes of a movie. It’s 10 percent to 20 percent of whatever you make depending on how good of a friend they are.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“Almost everyone I’ve ever met likes to hear a story from the beginning. It’s a curious prejudice, when you think about it. In life, we almost never know the beginning of a story. We are always coming in somewhere in the middle.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“The prevailing opinion is that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. He didn’t. None of us do. All of us are accompanied by the things we have chosen to keep on our shelves. The bits and pieces that are dear to us.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“The victims remain in the most unlikely places—in the hearts and minds of strangers who can’t escape their silence. I believe in ghosts. I believe they continue to walk the earth hoping to heard. To that end, I will continue to walk, hoping to hear.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“Faith is the direct product of doubt. It is the bridge between what we have and what we want. Contrary to popular misconception, people who are religious doubt everything. Doubt is chronicled continuously in the Bible. From Abraham and Isaac, to Moses at the burning bush, to Jesus on the cross asking, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” All are narratives of doubt. Just as with Feynman’s physics, doubt propels the Bible. Doubt, not certainty, feeds imagination. I remain hopeful that someday I will be able to answer the first question I wanted to ask God when my mother told me a bedtime story: If we weren’t supposed to eat from the tree of knowledge, why was there an apple in the Garden of Eden?”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“On April 11, 2011, Oriel FeldmanHall of Cambridge University ran an experiment as to how people would react when they had to inflict pain on someone else. People were told they would get paid if they administered electric shocks to people in another room. It was the Milgram experiment with a twist. The people getting shocked would be televised. The greater the shock the person in the booth delivered, the more money he or she would get. Sixty-four percent said they would never deliver a shock, even a mild shock. But when the doctor pulled out the money, 96 percent of the participants jumped in and tried to get as much cash as they could. The more visible the victim was on the television monitor, the perpetrator delivered less of a shock. But when only the victim’s hand or foot was being shown on camera, empathy vanished. Maybe evil is the inability to see the human face.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“I admit that it has been hard to know God. I have had bouts of uncertainty. Being an actor, I have become accustomed to the condition. I have learned that doubt is like a bad hangover. It’s unpleasant, but it’s proof that you’re still alive.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God