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.
As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.
Ultimately there is no power to narcissistic, self-indulgent thinking. Authentic thinking originates with an encounter with the world.
God is everywhere or nowhere, the father of all people or of none, concerned about everything or nothing. Only in His presence shall we learn that the glory of humankind is not in its will to power but in its power of compassion.
It is gratefulness which makes the soul great.
A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
Prayer cannot bring water to parched fields, or mend a broken bridge, or rebuild a ruined city; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.
There is no specialized art of prayer. All of life must be a training to pray. We pray the way we live.
Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time.
The tragedy of religion is partly due to its isolation from life, as if God could be segregated.