“To sing means to sense and to affirm that the spirit is real and that its glory is present.”

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.

We can do justice to human being only by relating it to the transcendent care for being.

The tragedy of religion is partly due to its isolation from life, as if God could be segregated.

Get money, still get money, boy, no matter by what means.

If there’s anything mean in a feller, a litter authority will bring it out.

I don’t really hashtag things. Unless I’m talking to somebody and I’m being funny and I say something mean but then I’m like, Hashtag…something that’s funny. I like to only hashtag funny things, not real stuff.

When you talk about cooperation, it means cooperation between two legal governments, not cooperation between foreign government and any faction within Syria.

I am rediscovering the whole sexual dimension of life at the age of 86, really. And that also means discovering the feminine. So the whole of this dimension, which I had been seeking for a very long time, is now sort of opening itself up to me.

I think that since it’s prom, you should definitely wear a long dress. You can wear a short one anytime! This is the moment when you get to be a princess, and for me, that means a sweetheart neckline, long, then pouf – out and big.

Despite my mum being from a small village in the middle of a forest, I’m not a country person. I don’t like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers. But sometimes being police means holding your breath and fondling a pig.

The two party system just means that the corporations cut two checks instead of one.