“A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time”

Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.

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.

To exercise no-thought and rest in nothing is the first step toward resting in Tao. To start from nowhere and follow no road is the first step toward attaining Tao.

When affirmation and negation came into being, Tao faded. After Tao faded, then came one-sided attachments.

Those who follow the Tao are of clear mind. They do not load their mind with anxieties and are flexible in their adjustment to external conditions.

We must see what in the Israeli identity – in the Israeli – we can give to other people rather than speaking so often of taking, expanding territory.

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.

The whole wide world is a cathedral; I stand inside, the air is calm, And from afar at times there reaches My ear the echo of a psalm.

After a while, if you’re committed, you start to believe in the things in which you’re praying. It’s just cognitive dissonance. You can’t live a completely religious life and not start to have it sink in.

The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.