Why Faith Matters Quotes

“INTUITING THE UNSEEN is a gift of perspective. Albert Einstein said there are two ways to see the world: as if everything is a miracle or as if nothing is a miracle. Living with an awareness of the miraculous re-enchants the world. From a flower to a star, it is easy to confuse knowing what a thing is made of with knowing what it is. Significance overspills the physical description; mastering botany is not the same as appreciating beauty. Acknowledging that overflow, what a flower means or what a human being is, not in chemical composition but in spiritual significance, is seeing everything as a miracle.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“Honest people recognize the limitations of their own knowledge. God’s perfection does not extend to God’s creatures.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“I remembered the poem “Tourists” by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai; Amichai describes sitting with two baskets under a Roman arch in Jerusalem. A tour guide points out the arch to his group by noting it is just above the head of the man with shopping baskets. And the poet thinks that redemption would arrive if only the tour guide would say, “You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who’s bought fruit and vegetables for his family.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“I’VE OFTEN TOLD children the story of a man who stood before God, his heart breaking from the pain and injustice in the world. “Dear God,” he cried out, “Look at all the suffering, the anguish and distress in Your world. Why don’t you send help?” God responded: “I did send help. I sent you.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“it is a response to a reality beyond us. Far from being trapped in tribal illusions, we are liberated by transcendent truths.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made.” (A. E. Housman)”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“Increasingly, I learned that the great spirits of religious traditions do not solve all questions but live in the questions, and return to them again and again, not as a circle returns, but as an ascending spiral comes to the same place, each time at a higher level.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“All we know of Russell’s table is what we experience, and our experience differs from that of others and is dependent on where we are standing, what part we touch, how hard we touch it, and on and on. We are the blindfolded men around the elephant, each feeling but a small part of the whole. Some are arrogant enough to believe we can whip off the blindfold and see everything. But since the blindfold is the brain, it is not possible.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“As we are accustomed to acknowledging what we cannot see, the idea of God seems less strange. Nonphysical things are real; they are the stuff of life. Our lives pivot on real things that are non-material: ideas, emotions, imagination, memory, relationships, intuition, suffering, joy, and faith. To believe only in what you can see seems a peculiar form of blindness.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“How much of our lives take place in the elusive spaces of this world—how much is conveyed, like the artistry of the master musician, in the silence between the notes?”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“So long as I asked dismissive questions, faith seemed to me impossible. As life softened some edges and granted some wisdom, I began to ask out of genuine seeking, out of curiosity and not contempt. The very nature of a question opened my eyes to the possibility that what we cannot touch, what we cannot see, may indeed still be real.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“Browning, whose verse is famously obscure, was once approached by a woman who asked the meaning of a particular stanza. “Madame,” he answered, “when I wrote that only God and I knew what it meant. Now, only God knows.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“Teach your tongue to say ‘I don’t know.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“making sense of everything is not an obligation or even a possibility. So much of what goes on in the world, so much of what goes on even inside ourselves, is beyond our grasp. Acceptance of mystery is an act not of resignation but humility.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“Sometimes it seems that a plan is a useful illusion until life figures out where you really should be headed.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it is sufficient. Meister Eckhart”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“We are not physical creatures having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual creatures having a physical experience.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters