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.
The world is not divine sport, it is divine destiny. There is a divine meaning of the world, of man, of human persons, of you and me.
The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.
God is the “mysterium tremendum,” that appears and overthrows, but he is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I.
This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being...
There is something that can be found in one place. It is a great treasure which may be called the fulfillment of existence. The place where this treasure can be found is the place where one stands.
How would man exist if God did not need him, and how would you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you – for that is the meaning of your life.
We can learn to be whole by saying what we mean and doing what we say.
It pains me to speak of God in the third person.
Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons.
Feeling one “has”; love occurs.
To begin with oneself but not to end with onself. To start from oneself but not to aim at oneself.
Everyone has in him something precious that is in no one else.
Every man’s foremost task is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved.
God dwells wherever man lets Him in.