Great Throughts Treasury

"Life is not meaningful… unless it is serving an end beyond itself; unless it is of value to someone else."

"Life without commitment is not worth living."

"Madness is man’s desperate attempt to reach transcendence, to rise beyond himself."

"Man is a fountain of immense meaning, not merely a drop in the ocean of being."

"Man’s responsibility to God is the scaffold on which he stands as daily he goes on building life. His every deed, every incident of mind, takes place on this scaffold, so that unremittingly man is at work either building up or tearing down his life, his home, his hope of God."

"Man… is a messenger who forgot the message."

"Nobility is the redeemed quality which rises within the soul when it exchanges the transient for the permanent, the useful for the valuable."

"Our awareness of God is a syntax of the silence, in which our souls mingle with the divine, in which the ineffable in us communes with the ineffable beyond us."

"Our existence seesaws between animality and divinity, between that which is more and that which is less than humanity."

"Possession is loneliness."

"Prayer in action; it requires complete mobilization of heart, mind, and soul… For the soul, home is where the prayer is... Prayer calls for self-reflection, for contrition and repentance, examining and readjusting deeds and motivations, for recanting the ugly compulsions we follow, the tyranny of acquisitiveness, hatred, envy, resentment."

"Prayer is an act which makes the heart audible to God."

"Prayer is an invitation to God to intervene in our lives."

"Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living."

"Proximity to the crowd, to the majority view, spells the death of creativity. For a soul can create only when alone, and some are chosen for the flowering that takes place in the dark avenues of the night."

"Recollection is a holy act; we sanctify the present by remembering the past… The essence of faith is memory."

"Religion declined not because it was refuted but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion – its message becomes meaningless."

"Religion has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty. It survives on the level of activities rather than in the stillness of commitment."

"Religion is a means, not an end. It becomes idolatrous when regarded as an end in itself."

"Responsibility implies freedom, and man, who is in bondage to environment, to social ties, to inner disposition, may yet enjoy freedom before God."

"Reverence for God is shown in our reverence for man. The fear you must feel for offending or hurting a human being must be as ultimate as your fear of God. An act of violence is an act of desecration. To be arrogant toward man is to be blasphemous toward God."

"Routine breeds attention."

"Self-satisfaction is the opiate of fools."

"Social dynamics is no substitute for moral responsibility."

"The beginning of faith is not a feeling for the mystery of living or a sense of awe, wonder, or fear. The root of religion is the question what to do with the feeling for the mystery of living, what to do with awe, wonder, or fear. Religion, the end of isolation, begins with a consciousness that something is asked of us. It is in that tense, eternal asking in which the soul is caught and in which man’s answer is elicited."

"The Bible is God’s anthropology rather than man’s theology."

"The conscience is… a brake, not a guide; a fence, not a way. It raises its voice after a wrong deed has been committed, but often fails to give us direction in advance of our actions."

"The darkness of history… conceals alight. Beyond the mystery is meaning. And the meaning is destined to be disclosed."

"The goal of religion is not primarily to help us to express ourselves but to bring us closer to God."

"The grandeur of nature is only the beginning. Beyond the Grandeur is God."

"The greatest heresy is despair."

"The greatest problem is not how to continue but how to exalt our existence. The cry for a life beyond the grave is presumptuous, if there is not cry for eternal life prior to our descending to the grave. Eternity is not perpetual future but perpetual presence. He has planted in us the seed of eternal life. The world to come is not only a hereafter but also a here-now."

"The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments... Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time... Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time."

"The island of existence is washed by the two oceans of eternity and nothingness, eroding it into what is less and elevating it into what is more than existence, into nothingness and into a higher reality, namely, the identity of event and value, the unity of being and meaning."

"The issue we should all ponder is moral, not legal; responsibility, rather than guilt; prevention rather than punishment."

"The predicament of contemporary man is grave. We seem to be destined either for a new mutation or for destruction."

"The problem is the spirit of our age: denial of transcendence, the vapidity of values, emptiness in the heart, the decreased sensitivity to the imponderable quality of the spirit, the collapse of communication between the realm of tradition and the inner world of the individual."

"The prophet perceives the whole world in terms of justice or injustice."

"The quest for symbols is a trap for those who seek the truth."

"The solution of mankind’s most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence of it."

"The spirituality that flows from our actions is not fleeting, transient, or solitary in a silent cosmos. The music of refined actions, the melody of a noble soul, is woven into the tapestry of eternal music which God Himself composed."

"The tyranny of conformity tends to deprive man of his inner identity, of his ability to stand still in the midst of flux, to remain a person in the midst of a crowd."

"The world to come is not only a hereafter but also a herenow."

"There is a built-in sense of indebtedness in the consciousness of man, an awareness of owing gratitude, of being called upon at certain moments to reciprocate, to answer, to live in a way which is compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living."

"Things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for the transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal."

"This is the difference between religion and philosophy. Religion begins with the sense of the ineffable; philosophy ends with the sense of the ineffable. Religion begins where philosophy ends."

"To be a Jew is to affirm the world without being enslaved to it; to be a part of civilization and to go beyond it; to conquer space and to sanctify time. Judaism is the art of surpassing civilization, sanctification of time, sanctification of history."

"To understand the teaching of the Bible, one must accept its premise that time has a meaning which is at least equal to that of space; that time has a significance and sovereignty of its own."

"Vacancy of experience cannot be compensated for by a lack of bias."

"We appreciate what we share, we do not appreciate what we receive."