“Life is not meaningful…unle ss it is serving an end beyond itself; unless it is of value to someone else.”

That man can never transcend his own self. The most fatal trap into which thinking may fall is the equation of existence and expediency.

The man who has not suffered – what does he know anyway?

Wisdom, maturity, tranquility do not come all of a sudden when we retire.

Speech has power. Words do not fade. What starts out as a sound, ends in a deed.

Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.

I have one talent, and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised, surprised at life, at ideas. This is to me the supreme Hasidic imperative: Don’t be old. Don’t be stale.

In the midst of our applauding the feats of civilization, the Bible flings itself like a knife slashing our complacency; remind us that God, too, has a voice in history.

A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children.

At all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.

New insight begins when satisfaction comes to an end, when all that has been seen, said, or done looks like a distortion. …

Faith like Job’s cannot be shaken becasue it is the result of having been shaken.

Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme.

Prayer begins at the edge of emptiness.

The road to the sacred leads through the secular.

Dear Lord, grant me the grace of wonder. Surprise me, amaze me, awe me in every crevice of your universe.

Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society’s hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.

The good is the end toward which all things tend.

A fraudulent intent, however carefully concealed at the outset, will generally, in the end, betray itself.

No person learned the art of archery from me, who did not in the end make me his target.

When I left the house of bondage I left everything behind. I wanted to keep nothing of Egypt on me, and so I went to the Lord and asked him to give me a new name.

Life is a movie, and you’re the star. Give it a happy ending.

I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful – an endless prospect of magic and wonder.

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me’.

And I don’t really like golf. I know a lot of English footballers play, but I know that if I go with the club to play, sooner or later I will end up trying to smash the ball with my foot.