Quotes from Lionel Blue

I have begun to sympathetically understand Paul, though I don't like him much.

I was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay.

Christianity had two faces which bewildered me - two pictures which didn't fit.

I still go to a Christian priory for retreats.

My mother enjoyed old age, and because of her I've begun to enjoy parts of it too. So far I've had it good and am crumbling nicely.

My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charleston.

I once asked God what I could give him. "Your problems," he said. "I've got everything else.

I am pleased now that I have lived in a gay as well as a religious ghetto, though it hasn't been very comfortable. Taken together, their limitations cancel each other out and I have seen the world more kindly and more honestly.

I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can't be learnt in lecture halls.

For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.

The Christian use of religion as a personal love affair both shocked me, and attracted me.

The real evidence for Jesus and Christianity is in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practicing Christians.

I found that when I did something for the sake of heaven, heaven happened. These things changed my life. I owe them to my encounter with Christianity.

Jews are just like everyone else, only more so.

The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.

It is not possible to unknow what you do know - the result of that is fanaticism.

To change, to convert? Why bother?

What would I have done if I'd been put to the test? Would I have risked my own life for people I hardly knew? Probably, I would have looked the other way at best or become another apologist for evil at worst.

Someone gave me a New Testament. I had never before read it systematically. Some parts made sense, some parts shocked me.

I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.

An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!

It was admitted by the early rabbis that the sectarians could be as full of good works as eggs were full of meat.

To my surprise, my 70s are nicer than my 60s and my 60s than my 50s, and I wouldn't wish my teens and 20s on my enemies.

I feel that the Christian experience and the Jewish one have much to give each other. If this open society continues and there is no return to political anti-Semitism, then this encounter, deeper than any theology, may happen.