Quotes from Jacob Needleman

God acts in history: that is, God provides ideas, methods, and experiences intended to bring comprehension to man, an understanding heart, a conscious life.

Life is not so much defined by the external situation as it is by the internal one.

To be totally engaged with all my functions and all my faculties and all my capacities in life to me that would be success.

What is it that makes all of us end each day with the sense that we have not lived our time, but have been lived, used by what we do?

To love my neighbor is to assist the arising and unfolding in him of that which can harmonize the real elements of his nature.

We are human beings, beings whose fundamental food is the experience of truth.

This is the mark of great ideas: they unify people and they also act to unify the disparate parts of the human being; they speak of a social order that is possible on the basis of an ordering within the individual self.

Man must have results, real results, in his inner and outer life. I do not mean the results which modern people strive after in their attempts at self-development. These are not results, but only rearrangements of psychic material, a process the Buddhists call 'samsara' and which our Holy Bible calls 'dust'.

Remember how long you have been putting these things off, and how often you have received an opportunity from the gods and have not made use of it. By now you ought to realize what cosmos you are apart of, and what divine administrator you owe your existence to, and that an end to your time here has been marked out, and if you do not use this time for clearing the clouds from your mind, it will be gone and so will you.

What an abundance of leisure the person gains who is not looking over at what his neighbor is saying, doing, or thinking, but only at what he himself is doing, in order that he does what is just and respectful of the gods. As Agathon4 said, do not peer into the darkness of another's character, but run straight toward the finish line without straying from your path.

The struggle to exist, to not disappear in this moment, is the advancing root of the struggle to exist throughout the whole passage of time. We need to help each other in this struggle. You by asking, I by struggling to respond. This is the law of love, which rules the universe.

One of the great purposes of the American nation is to shelter and guard the rights of all men and women to seek the conditions and the companions necessary for the inner search.

It's good to be open-minded, but not so open that your brains fall out. -Jacob Needleman

Faith cannot be shaken, it is the result of being shaken.