A soul can create only when alone...
I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder.
All events are secretly interrelated; the sweep of all we are doing reaches beyond the horizon of our comprehension.
This is one of the goals of the Jewish way of living: to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things.
Religion has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty. It survives on the level of activities rather than in the stillness of commitment.
Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds.
Faith is something that comes out of the soul. It is not an information that is absorbed but an attitude, existing prior to the formulation of any creed.
Much of what the Bible demands can be comprised in one imperative: Remember!
The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God. One cannot pray unless he has faith in his own ability to accost the infinite, merciful, eternal God.
Being is transcended by a concern for being. Our perplexity will not be solved by relating human existence to a timeless, subpersonal abstraction which we call essence. We can do justice to human being only by relating it to the transcendent care for being.
Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man’s attitude toward history and nature.
Life without commitment is not worth living.
I am commanded therefore I am.
Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society’s hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.
Speech has power. Words do not fade. What starts out as a sound, ends in a deed.
Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you.
Indeed, the sort of crimes and even the amount of delinquency that fill the prophets of Israel with dismay do not go beyond that which we regard as normal, as typical ingredients of social dynamics. To us a single act of injustice – cheating in business, exploitation of the poor – is slight; to the prophets, a disaster. To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence: to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world.
The Sabbath is the day on which we learn the art of surpassing civilization.
The solution of mankind’s most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence of it.
Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.