When people come to you for help, do not turn them off with pious words, saying, ‘Have faith and take your troubles to God.’ Act instead as though there were no God, as though there were only one person in the world who could help – only yourself.
I think no human being can give more than this. Making life possible for the other, if only for a moment.
Everything depends on inner change; when this has taken place, then, and only then does the world change.
Real faith means holding ourselves open to the unconditional mystery which we encounter in every sphere of our life and which cannot be comprised in any formula. Real faith means the ability to endure life in the face of this mystery.
The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.
The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.
God made so many different kinds of people; why would God allow only one way to worship?
I don’t like religion much, and I am glad that in the Bible the word is not to be found.
To love God truly, one must first love man. And if anyone tells you that he loves God and does not love his fellow-man, you will know that he is lying.
There is no room for God in him who is full of himself.
If you want to raise a man from mud and filth, do not think it is enough to stay on top and reach a helping hand down to him. You must go all the way down yourself, down into mud and filth. Then take hold of him with strong hands and pull him and yourself out into the light.
He who loves brings God and the World together.
The true meaning of love one’s neighbor is not that it is a command from God which we are to fulfill, but that through it and in it we meet God.
What has to be given up is not the I, but that drive for self-affirmation which impels man to flee from the unreliable, unsolid, unlasting, unpredictable, dangerous world of relation into the having of things.
The historical religions have the tendency to become ends in themselves, and, as it were, to put themselves in God’s place, and, in fact, there is nothing that is so apt to obscure God’s face as a religion.
What you must do is love your neighbor as yourself. There is no one who knows your many faults better than you! But you love yourself notwithstanding. And so you must love your neighbor, no matter how many faults you see in him.
To be old can be glorious if one has not unlearned how to begin.
I shall teach you the best way to say Torah. You must cease to be aware of yourselves. You must be nothing but an ear that hears what the universe of the word is constantly saying within you. The moment you start hearing what you yourself are saying, YOU must stop.
When a man has made peace within himself, he will be able to make peace in the whole world.
Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.