Whatever you say about God you should be able to say standing over a pit full of burning babies.
Let us remember that sorrow alone is the creator of great things.
He answered nothing. If you failed to do the right thing, talk was useless.
Only our concept of Time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.
I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes.
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives forever.
You can’t do anything with anybody’s body to make it dirty to me. Six people, eight people, one person — you can only do one thing to make it dirty: kill it. Hiroshima was dirty.
There are some faults so nearly allied to excellence that we can scarce weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue.
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.
I think one should forgive and remember. . . . If you forgive and forget in the usual sense, you’re just driving what you remember into the subconscious; it stays there and festers. But to look, even regularly, upon what you remember and know you’ve forgiven is achievement.
It does not do you good to leave a dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.
Hatred is human; indifference is the final degradation of humanity.
The sorrows of humanity are no one’s sorrows. . . . A thousand people drowned in floods in China is news; a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.
Think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thoughts all this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God.
Guard the mysteries! Constantly reveal them!
If triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.
The amazing process . . . begins with the decision not to fight against our vices, not to run away from them nor conceal them, but to bring them into the light. If the desire to be honest is greater than the desire to be good or bad, then the terrific power of our vices will become manifest, and behind the vice the old forgotten fear will turn up (the fear of being excluded from life), and behind the fear the pain (the pain of not being loved), and behind this pain of loneliness the deepest and most powerful and most hidden of all human desires: the desire to love, to give oneself, and to be part of the living stream that we call brotherhood.
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
