We must first peer into the darkness, feel strangled and entombed in the hopelessness of living without God, before we are ready to feel the presence of His living light.
It is dangerous to take human freedom for granted, to regard it as a prerogative rather than as an obligation, as an ultimate fact rather than as an ultimate goal. It is the beginning of wisdom to be amazed at the fact of our being free.
Every little deed counts.
The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests. The primary purpose is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and man cannot live without a song. Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.
In any free society where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty – all are responsible.
The test of love is in how one relates not to saints and scholars but to rascals.
In a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for truth and have begun striving for ourselves.
To serve does not mean to surrender but to share.
God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.
Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society.
The problem to be faced is: how to combine loyalty to one’s own tradition with reverence for different traditions.
Man’s sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God.
For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.
God is either of no importance, or of supreme importance.
We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.
The road to the sacred leads through the secular.
Racism is man’s gravest threat to man – the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.
There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.
When religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.
We worry a great deal about the problem of church and state. Now what about the church and God? Sometimes there seems to be a greater separation between the church and God than between the church and state.