“The supremacy of expediency is being refuted by time and truth.”

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.

Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.

Loyal to the presence of the ultimate in the common, we may be able to make it clear that man is more than man, that in doing the finite he may perceive the infinite .

Then comes the insight that All is God. One still realizes that the world is as it was, but it does not matter, it does not affect one’s faith.

Life without commitment is not worth living.

People are anxious to save up financial means for old age; they should also be anxious to prepare a spiritual means for old age….

All that is left is to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.

However, we must not convert an inclination into an axiom that just as man’s perceptions cannot operate outside time and space, so his motivations cannot operate outside expediency;

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.

The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong.

Custom adapts itself to expediency.