“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.”

Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.

Much of what the Bible demands can be comprised in one imperative: Remember!

Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.

It’s silence remains unbroken; no words can carry it away. Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear–filling grandeur.

A religious man is a person… whose greatest passion is compassion.

Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine.

Audacious longing, burning songs, daring thoughts, an impulse overwhelming the heart, usurping the mind–these are all a drive towards serving Him who rings our hearts like a bell.

The work on weekdays and the rest on the seventh day are correlated. The Sabbath is the inspirer, the other days the inspired.

You must build your life as if it were a work of art.

The course of life is unpredictable no one can write his autobiography in advance.

Only those will apprehend religion who can probe its depth, who can combine intuition and love with the rigor of method

Normal consciousness is a state of stupor, in which the sensibility to the wholly real and responsiveness to the stimuli of the spirit are reduced.

Faith is something that comes out of the soul. It is not an information that is absorbed but an attitude, existing prior to the formulation of any creed.

There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.

Being points beyond itself. Accustomed to think in terms of space, the expression “being points beyond itself” may be taken to denote a higher point in space.

All action is vicarious faith.

You’d better have the technology knowledge. I really urge you not to think you can start a whole company and business with just ideas on paper, because you’ll end up owning so few of those ideas.

If I thought that any poem of mine could have been written by anyone else, either a contemporary or a forerunner, I should suppress it with a blush; and I should do the same if I ever found I were imitating myself. Every poem should be new, unexpected, inimitable, and incapable of being parodied.

When I’m killed, don’t think of me Buried there in Cambrin Wood, Nor as in Zion think of me With the Intolerable Good. And there’s one thing that I know well, I’m damned if I’ll be damned to Hell!

The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.

Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.

It is the rare fortune of these days that one may think what one likes and say what one thinks.

Never use the word ‘audience.’ The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don’t have an ‘audience’. They’re talking to a single person all the time.

Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.