Quote collection
149 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The world is a spinning die, and everything turns and changes: man is turned into angel, and angel into man, and the head into the foot, and the foot into the head. Thus all things turn and spin and change, this into that, and that into this, the topmost to the undermost, and the undermost to the topmost. For at the root all is one, and salvation inheres in the change and return of things."
"In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself."
"If a person kills a tree before its time, it is like having murdered a soul.-Rabbi Nachman"
"As long as the firmament of the You is spread over me, the tempests of causality cower at my heels, and whirl of doom congeals."
"When we rise out of [the night] into the new life and there begin to receive the signs, what can we know of that which - of him who gives them to us? Only what we experience from time to time from the signs themselves. If we name the speaker of this speech God, then it is always the God of a moment, a moment God."
"To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence."
"The prophet is appointed to oppose the kind, and even more: history."
"Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God, it is the road itself."
"But when a man draws a lifeless thing into his passionate longing for dialogue, lending it independence and as it were a soul, then there may dawn in him the presentiment of a world-wide dialogue with the world-happening that steps up to him even in his environment, which consists partially of things. Or do you seriously think that the giving and taking of signs halts on the threshold of that business where an honest and open spirit is found?"