When I look at the world I'm pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic.
We are never more fully alive, more completely ourselves, or more deeply engrossed in anything, than when we are at play.
It is easier to act yourself into a new way of feeling than to feel yourself into a new way of acting.
Russia contains one fourth of the inhabitants of all Europe, and one half of the entire number of Israelites.
...it was regarded as almost outside the proper interest of an analyst to give systematic attention to a person's real experiences.
Proselytizing is only wrong if coercive or deceptive. Coercion, whether violent or not, is immoral, just as deception is immoral.
Most Jews, like most rational persons, know that their personal identity and their ethnic identity are not one and the same.
Many of us, both Jews and Christians, want the public square to be pluralistic, which is neither partisan nor naked.
Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. I will not forget thy word. Amen.
I think self-discipline is something, it's like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.
The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.
Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams... but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.
Anytime we're interacting with someone, we're judging them, we're sharing expectations, we think they didn't live up to those expectations.
It was in the early 1960s that my late revered teacher, Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, became the first major Jewish theologian in America to enter into dialogue with Christian theologians on a high theological level.
Accomplishment is socially judged by ill defined criteria so that one has to rely on others to find out how one is doing.
If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
I think about something I once heard on the radio. About Abraham and Isaac." "I was afraid you'd say something like that." "You asked." "So what about them? I don't really know much about that kind of stuff." "There was a pastor on the radio who said...
If Lincoln freed the slaves and preserved the Union, how come 'Lincolnesque' just means tall?
And, finally, Lincoln was not a good impromptu speaker; he was at his best when he could read from a carefully prepared manuscript. Though maybe a teleprompter could have helped that!
I do believe there are leaders who are like lightning and they come along and they lead. The Lincolns of the world, the Alexander the Greats, they do exist. They have existed.
Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.
