41 quotes
Much of what the Bible demands can be comprised in one imperative: Remember!
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
In the realm of faith, God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. To rationalists He is something after which they seek in the darkness with the light of their reason. To men of faith He is the light.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
It is a distortion to regard reason and faith as alternatives. Reason is a necessary coefficient of faith. Faith without explication by reason is mute, reason without faith is deaf.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
To a noble person it is a holy joy to remember, an overwhelming thrill to be grateful, while to a person whose character is neither rich nor strong, gratitude is a most painful sensation.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
The rush of reason is an effort of limited strength.
Faith is not the miniature of thinking but its model, not its shadow but its root.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
Renewal of prayer calls for a renewal of language, of cleansing the words, of revival of meanings.
The strength of faith is in silence, and in words that hibernate and wait.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
Those of faith who plant sacred thoughts in the uplands of time, the secret gardeners of the Lord in mankind's desolate hopes, may slacken and tarry but rarely betray their vocation.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
We live by the certainty that we are not dust in the wind, that our life is related to the ultimate, the meaning of all meanings.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
The account of our experiences, the record of debit and credit, is reflected in the amount of trust or distrust we display towards life and humanity.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
Out of the world comes a behest to instill into the air a rapturous song for God, to incarnate in the stones a message of humble beauty, and to instill a prayer for goodness in the hearts of all children.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
All action is vicarious faith.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
Faith is an awareness of divine mutuality and companionship, a form of communion between God and man. It is not a psychical quality, something that exists in the mind only, but a force from the beyond.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
To be or not to be is not the question. The vital question is: how to be and how not to be?
The tendency to forget this vital question is the tragic disease of contemporary man, a disease that may prove fatal, that may end in disaster.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
Instead of indulging in jealousy, greed, in relishing themselves, there are men who keep their hearts alert to the stillness in which time rolls on and leaves us behind. … those who are open to the wonder will not miss it. Faith is found in solicitude for faith, in an inner care for the wonder that is everywhere.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
He whose soul is charged with awareness of God earns his inner livelihood by a passionate desire to pour his life into the eternal wells of love. … We do not live for our own sake. Life would be preposterous if not for the love it confers.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
Trust is the core of human relationships, of gregariousness among men. Friendship, a puzzle to the syllogistic and critical mentality, is not based on experiments or tests of another person's qualities but on trust. It is not critical knowledge but a risk of the heart which initiates affection and preserves loyalty in our fellow men.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
Only straight discovering in the nearest stone or tree, sound or thought, the shelter of His often desecrated goodness, the treasury of His waiting form man's heart to affiliate with His will — this is the rapture of faith. It is an echo to a pleading voice, a reply to the inconceivable in all beauty.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
Society today is no longer in revolt against particular laws which it finds alien, unjust, and imposed, but against law as such, against the principle of law. And yet we must not regard this revolt as entirely negative. The energy that rejects many obsolete laws is an entirely positive impulse for renewal of life and law.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
Not the individual man nor a single generation by its own power can erect the bridge that leads to God. Faith is the achievement of many generations, and effort accumulated over many centuries. … There is a collective memory of God in the human spirit, and it is this memory which is the main source of our faith.
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
The Torah has not imposed upon Israel a tyranny of the spirit. It does not violate human nature. On the contrary, the road to the sacred leads through the secular. The spiritual rests upon the carnal, like "the Spirit that hovers over the face of the water. " Jewish living means living according to a system of checks and balances. We are not asked anything that cannot be responded to. We are not told: Love thy enemy, but Do not hate him, and positively: "If thou meet thine enemy's ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt surely bring it back to him again." (Exodus 23:4).
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)