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

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.

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. …