Quotes About Spirituality

Judaism is God's quest for man.

It is not utility that we seek in religion but eternity.

Six days a week the spirit is alone, disregarded, forsaken, forgotten.

The Torah is primarily divine ways rather than divine laws.

The plea is not to obey what He wills but to do what He is.

To the religious man it is as if things stood with their backs to him, their faces turned to God, as if the glory of things consisted in their being an object of divine care.

Yet our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but rather how to remain human in the skyscrapers. NOTES 1 Portions of this section are based on Heschel, Man Is Not Alone (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1951).

Religion is an answer to man's ultimate questions. The moment we become oblivious to ultimate questions, religion becomes irrelevant, and its crisis sets in.

The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays for the sake of the Sabbath. It is not an interlude but a climax of living.

Standing face to face with the world, we often sense a spirit which surpasses our ability to comprehend. The world is too much for us. It is crammed with marvel. The glory is not an exception but an aura that lies about all being, a spiritual setting of reality.

To most of us a person, a human being, seems to be a maximum of being, the ceiling of reality; we think that to personify is to glorify. Yet do not some of us realize at times that a person is no superlative, that to personify the spiritually real is to belittle it? A personification may be both a distortion and a depreciation.

He who wishes to ponder what is beyond the Bible must first learn to be sensitive to what is within the Bible.

Two sources of religious thinking are given us: memory (tradition) and personal insight. We must rely on our memory and we must strive for fresh insight.

It is not enough to think about the prophets; we must think through the prophets. It is not enough to read the Bible for its wisdom; we must pray the Bible to comprehend its claim.

The role of religion is to be a challenge to philosophy, not merely an object for examination.

The way to understand the meaning of torah min hashamayim ("the Bible is from heaven") is to understand the meaning of hashamayim min hatorah ("heaven is from the Bible). Whatever taste of "heaven" we have on earth is in the Bible.

to the Bible the idea of the good is penultimate; it cannot exist without the holy. The holy is the essence, the good is its expression.

We must constantly remember: we spoil and God restores. How ugly is the way in which we spoil, and how good and how beautiful is the way in which He restores.

These are the three pillars on which our prayer rises to God: our own loyalty, the holiness of Israel, the mercy of God.

Freedom does not mean the right to live as we please. It means the power to live spiritually, to rise to a higher level of existence.

I believe the Bible is the best gift God has ever given to man. All the good from The Savior of the world is communicated to us through this Book.

Quando faccio bene mi sento bene. Quando faccio male mi sento male. Questa è la mia religione.

U re u re na-nam Gi re gi re na-nam Mu re mu re na-nam

Man seeks ecstasy and transcendence, and if he cannot find them in church, he will look for them elsewhere.