“The utilization of its resources is taken to be the chief purpose of man in God’s creation.”

The task of life is to face sacred moments.

The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.

Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.

One of the major symptoms of the general crisis existent in our world today is our lack of sensitivity to words.

God is not nice. God is not an uncle. God is an earthquake.

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.

The opposite of good is not evil, the opposite of good is indifference.

Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.

But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.

The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.

Proximity to the crowd, to the majority view, spells the death of creativity. For a soul can create only when alone, and some are chosen for the flowering that takes place in the dark avenues of night.

Self-respect is the root of discipline

This is one of the goals of the Jewish way of living: to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things.

Aeons hence, when of many of our cherished theories only shreds will remain, that cosmic tapestry will continue to shine.

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.

Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.

Throughout history, government has proved to be the chief instrument for thwarting man’s liberty.

One of the chief peculiarities of this treatise is the doctrine that the true electric current, on which the electromagnetic phenomena depend, is not the same thing as the current of conduction, but that the time-variation of the electric displacement must [also] be taken into account.

The chief philosophical value of physics is that it gives the mind something distinct to lay hold of, which, if you don’t, Nature at once tells you you are wrong.

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

Of all the needs a book has the chief need is that it be readable.

The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.

ISIS and Iran have declared war on America, and we need a commander in chief who will do everything necessary to keep our children safe.

As Chief Secretary to the Treasury, I aim to be the disrupter in chief.