Israel ben Eliezer (Baal Shem Tov) Quotes
Quotes to Explore
-
Almost all our suffering is the product of our thoughts. We spend nearly every moment of our lives lost in thought, and hostage to the character of those thoughts. You can break this spell, but it takes training just like it takes training to defend yourself against a physical assault.
-
There's such a pressure on women that we put on ourselves and everyone else puts on us to look unrealistic and everything, but you just can't compare yourself to people in magazines.
-
The first movie my dad ever showed me was 'Predator' – I was five. And I think the second one was 'Jaws.'
-
State assaults on the separation of church and state are nothing new.
-
I was obsessed with the idea of going to college. And I took many years off after that, so I sort of missed the weird, crazy transition that was what making movies was in the nineties to what's happening now.
-
I don't think you should exploit your own pain.
-
No one will understand a Japanese garden until you've walked through one, and you hear the crunch underfoot, and you smell it, and you experience it over time. Now there's no photograph or any movie that can give you that experience.
-
This is Earth. Isn't it hot?
-
People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.
-
I'm not a universalist, and the way I talk about final loss is this: People worship idols - money, whatever. Their humanness gets reshaped around the idol - you become like what you worship. That's one of the basic spiritual laws.
-
I take pride in taking care of all the housework so that my wife, who works as a designer for Martha Stewart, won't need to sacrifice any of her leisure time when she gets home.
-
I feel lucky to be getting older. The fact that I made it to 30 and then 40 was big enough. So I can't get too down on getting older; otherwise, it kind of undoes everything I've fought for.
-
Any econometrician who wants to see practical application of his science will be highly concerned with applications to economic planning at the national level.
-
I still love records, and I've been fortunate that my parents bought me a record player so I didn't just have my vinyls to stare at!
-
Basically, what it comes down to is I love what I do. I don't do it for fame. I don't do it for money. I just love it.
-
Cultures are never merely intellectual constructs. They take form through the collective intelligence and memory, through a commonly held psychology and emotions, through spiritual and artistic communion.
-
To me, 'rock star' conjures up something like a mystic: someone who sees himself as above other people, someone who has the key to the secret that people want to know.
-
In my humble opinion, change is stupid.
-
I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.
-
Part of what we have to do a better job of, if our democracy is to function in a complicated diverse society like this, is to teach our kids enough critical thinking to be able to sort out what is true and what is false, what is contestable and what is incontestable. And we seem to have trouble with that. And our political system doesn't help.
-
God uses chronic pain and weakness, along with other afflictions, as his chisel for sculpting our lives.
-
"The flowers have appeared in our land: the time of pruning is come: the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land." When the soul, like the solitary turtle-dove, retires and recollects itself in meditation to converse with God, then the flowers, that is, good desires, appear; then comes the time of pruning, that is, the correction of faults that are discovered in mental prayer.
-
Before you can find God, you must lose yourself.
