"What we respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake … We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—since there is no other metaphor—also the soul."

Christopher Hitchens.

(h/t @kateopolis)

(Source: washingtonpoststyle)