“Yet the abyss is not not infinite; its bottom may suddenly be discovered within the confines of a human heart or under the debris of might doubts.”

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. …

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.

Who falls from all he knows of bliss, Cares little into what abyss.

The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children.

Irrespective of any external, regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.

Infinity imagines curiosity from the wild abyss – Only the child makes a swing-set view of the worlds upside down.

Awareness naturally returns to its non-state of absolute unmanifest potential, the silent abyss beyond all knowing.

The anchor of meaning resides in an abyss, deeper than the reach of despair.

Let art be your personal savior. Dragging you down a happy abyss. Let it channel all your emotions. Potential never going amiss.