Lionel Blue Quotes

It was admitted by the early rabbis that the sectarians could be as full of good works as eggs were full of meat.

Old friends die on you, and they're irreplaceable. You become dependent.

Praying privately in churches, I began to discover that heaven was my true home and also that it was here and now, woven into this life.

If a dish doesn't turn out right, change the name and don't bat an eyelid. A fallen souffle is only a risen omelette. It depends on the self-confidence with which you present it.

In speaking of Jesus, I must speak about Christianity because I do not think it possible or profitable to divide the two.

To change, to convert? Why bother?

I found that when I did something for the sake of heaven, heaven happened. These things changed my life. I owe them to my encounter with Christianity.

The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.

Discrimination against Jews can be read in Thomas Aquinas, and insults against Jews in Martin Luther.

Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity.

When you do a good turn you feel rich, even if you are broke.

To my surprise, my 70s are nicer than my 60s and my 60s than my 50s, and I wouldn't wish my teens and 20s on my enemies.

I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.

This Christian poison hasn't stopped yet.

Jews are just like everyone else, only more so.

I still go to a Christian priory for retreats.

I am pleased now that I have lived in a gay as well as a religious ghetto, though it hasn't been very comfortable. Taken together, their limitations cancel each other out and I have seen the world more kindly and more honestly.

During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.

My mother enjoyed old age, and because of her I've begun to enjoy parts of it too. So far I've had it good and am crumbling nicely.

The Christian use of religion as a personal love affair both shocked me, and attracted me.

I was not comfortable worshipping another Jew.

At religious instruction classes, I encountered The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, and the sincerity of the traveller in that book was overwhelming.

I was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay.

On the way to work good-hearted young girls sometimes offer me their seats, which I accept and bless them in return, a transaction satisfying to all concerned.

The real evidence for Jesus and Christianity is in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practicing Christians.

For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.

My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charleston.

I was not allowed a physical lover. Falling in love with Love was the best I could get.

Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again.

I began to see that my problems, seen spiritually, were really my soul's plusses.

I have ended as a Reform Rabbi, grateful to Christianity for so many good things.

What would I have done if I'd been put to the test? Would I have risked my own life for people I hardly knew? Probably, I would have looked the other way at best or become another apologist for evil at worst.

I recovered my infant Judaism, but in a reformist version.

I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can't be learnt in lecture halls.

Because of my Marxism, I was not into myths or miracles, whether it was the virgin birth, the physical resurrection or casting out demons from an epileptic.

For a devotee or lover, the being, worshipped or loved, will always be the only one for her or him.

I didn't want to be on the losing side. I was fed up with Jewish weakness, timidity and fear. I didn't want any more Jewish sentimentality and Jewish suffering. I was sickened by our sad songs.

I thought of such Christian inventions as the ghetto and the Jewish badge of shame. The Nazis didn't have to go very far to pick up their know-how.

An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!

It's more fun to watch without joining in.

For a Christian, Jesus is the unique and only way that God has fully revealed himself. For a Jew this cannot be.

I feel that the Christian experience and the Jewish one have much to give each other. If this open society continues and there is no return to political anti-Semitism, then this encounter, deeper than any theology, may happen.