Jonathan Sacks Quotes

The Lord showed me, so that I did see clearly, that he did not dwell in these temples which men had commanded and set up, but in people's hearts... his people were his temple, and he dwelt in them.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

I believe in something that maybe can be defined as the God in one's heart, in the heart of every human being, but not in a God who sits on high looking down on us and taking care of us and whom we bother with things trivial and weighty so that he will be good to us and arrange things for us here.

What was it, he wondered for the hundredth time, that enabled Pastor Harris to hear the answers in his heart? What did he mean when he said he felt God’s presence? Steve supposed he could ask Pastor Harris directly, but he doubted that would do any good. How could anyone explain such a thing? It would be like describing colors to someone blind from birth: The words might be understood, but the concept would remain mysterious and private.

God warms his hands at man's heart when he prays.

I carry my own church about under my own hat," said I. "Bricks and mortar won't make a staircase to heaven. I believe with your Master that the human heart is the best temple.

The heart that knows God can find God anywhere.

When the Spirit of God comes into us, He wants to be Himself in us. He wants His energy to be poured through us. He wants His wisdom to be deposited in our hearts. He wants His instinct and nature to be evident and obvious in you.He wants us to see what He is looking at, to feel what He feels, to know what He knows, to work with His projects, see life the way He sees it, get His ideas and know His opinion about yourself and others.

There is only one immediate question: Where is God? The immediate answer is: God is where My heart's love-breath is.

Do not seek God in outer space-- Your heart is the only place in which to meet Him face to face.

Our hearts seemed safe in our breasts and sang to the Light The marrow in the bone We dreamed was safe. . . the blood in the veins, the sap in the tree Were springs of Deity.

Deep in our Hearts, the Light of Heaven is shining.

God is not just one thing we add to the mix called life. He wants an invitation from us to permeate everything and every part of us.

Deep, solemn optimism, it seems to me, should spring from this firm belief in the presence of God in the individual; not a remote, unapproachable governor of the universe, but a God who is very near every one of us, who is present not only in earth, sea and sky, but also in every pure and noble impulse of our hearts.

Give me faith, Lord, to know Your Presence as surely as I know the beating of my own heart. I've felt so far from You.

What good is all our busy religion if God isn't in it? What good is it if we've lost majesty, reverence, worship-an awareness of the divine? What good is it if we've lost a sense of the Presence and the ability to retreat within our own hearts and meet God in the garden?

In recent years my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions. I'd come to think of God in terms like Divine Reality, the Absolute, or the One who holds us in being. I do believe that God is beyond any form and image, but it has grown clear to me that I need an image in order to relate. I need an image in order to carry on an intimate conversation with what is so vast, amorphous, mysterious, and holy that it becomes ungraspable. I mean, really, how to you become intimate with Divine Reality? Or the Absolute?

Belief in God is almost universal and the effect of this belief is so vast that one is appalled at the thought of what social conditions would be if reverence for God were erased from every heart.

There are times when I draw near enough to touch Him, then I know that He has been there all the time

I believe that God is the Great Companion, that we are not left orphans, that we may have comradeship with him.

Communing with God is communing with our own hearts, our own best selves, not with something foreign and accidental. Saints and devotees have gone into the wilderness to find God; of course they took God with them, and the silence and detachment enabled them to hear the still, small voice of their own souls, as one hears the ticking of his own watch in the stillness of the night.

Christianity is within a man, even as he is gifted with reason; it is associated with your mother's chair, and with the first remembered, tones of her blessed voice.

God wants people to meet Him when they meet us.

When I think of my God, my heart dances within me for joy, and then my music has to dance, too.