Quotes from Leo Baeck

Service of God consists in what we do to our neighbor.

The mark of a mature man is the ability to give love and receive it joyously and without guilt.

Through faith man experiences the meaning of the world through action he is to give to it meaning.

A minority is compelled to think; that is the blessing of its fate. It must always persist in a mental struggle for that consciousness of truth which success and power comfortingly assure to rulers and their supporting multitudes. The conviction of the many is based on the weight of possession; the conviction of the few is expressed through the energy of constant searching and finding.

Sin is the fate prepared by the individual when he disowns himself and makes of himself a mere object. Man does not fall into the sin of his fate, but into the fate of his sin.

A tradition is entrusted to human personalities which it reflects. What a man recalls as a word or an experience of the master is, even against his will and without his knowledge, colored by his own personality and character, by the littleness and the greatness in him, by his hopes, his longing, and his faith.

That which elevates the Christian to an essential superiority over the non-Christian is therefore not a higher level of morality as such. The decisive difference is to be found in baptism, where the miracle becomes effective. The sacrament gives everything and leads to everything. The preaching of Paul proclaims, not a new ethic, but a new salvation, a miracle which creates immortal men.

Honesty is the precondition for genuine scientific and scholarly work.

Faith is the capacity of the soul to perceive the abiding ... the invisible in the visible.