Hasdai Crescas Quotes

Reason is like an officer when the King appears;
The officer then loses his power and hides himself.
Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun.

We have been exceedingly busy ever since you went away. In the first place we have had to rejoice two or three times everyday at your having such very delightful weather for the whole of your journey...

Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

This is approximately the way Christendom relates to the essentially Christian, the unconditioned. After seventeen, eighteen detours and running all around someone finally has his finite existence assured, and then we receive a sermon about Seek first the kingdom of God. Is this sobriety or is this intoxication? p. 112

Cocaine addiction is God's way of saying "You make too damn much money!

Out of love, God becomes man. He says: Here you see what it is to be a human being; but he adds: Take care, for I am also God — blessed is he who takes no offense at me.

Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.

O God! If I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell

Nothing is more important than empathy for another human being’s suffering. Nothing — not a career, not wealth, not intelligence, certainly not status. We have to feel for one another if we’re going to survive with dignity.

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

By simple common sense I don't believe in God, in none.

Su Tungp'o said: "Life is like a spring dream which vanishes without a trace." I should be ungrateful to the gods if I did not try to put my life down on record.

Don't you know that a good and excellent person does nothing for the sake of appearances, but only for the sake of having acted right?

My God, what am I doing here? It's weird. How do you get to the Met? Money! Lots and lots of money! I can imagine Pavarotti next door at the improv going, "Two Jews walk into a bar...

It was as though some stubborn god spent their time in an immutable and absurd balancing act between life and death, prosperity and poverty.

Summa-lumma, dooma-lumma, you assumin' I'm a human
What I gotta do to get it through to you I'm superhuman?