Cynthia Ozick Quotes

To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God.

You can find the sacred in the most ordinary of things.

The divine is in all things.

The thing that brings people to wail at a wall, or face Mecca, or to go to church, is a search for that feeling of purity.

Celebrate the Sacred in the ordinary.

Every day is a Sabbath to me. All pure water is holy water, and this earth is a celestial abode.

God is still in the business of coming down to earth: to this cubicle, this email, this room, this house, this job, this hospital room, this car, this bed, this vacation. Any place can become Bethel, the house of God. Cleveland, maybe. Or the chair you're sitting in as you read these words.

Either all days are holy or none are.

Worship is forgetting about what's wrong with you and remembering what's right with God.

God and eternal things are my only pleasure.

Just one quality of the Buddha has to be remembered. He consists only of one quality: witnessing. This small word witnessing contains the whole of spirituality. Witness that you are not the body. Witness that you are not the mind. Witness that you are only a witness. As the witnessing deepens, you start becoming drunk with the divine. That is what is called ecstasy.

Zen is a totally different kind of religion. It brings humanness to religion. It is not bothered about anything superhuman; its whole concern is how to make ordinary life a blessing.

God oft hath a great share in a little house.

What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

Be ordinary, but bring a quality of awareness to your ordinary life. Bring God to your ordinary life introduce God into your ordinary life. Sleep, eat, love, pray, meditate, but don’t think that you are making or doing something special—and then you will be special.

There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.

Everything is touched by the holy when it is in the presence of death.

We may not all live holy lives, but we live in a world alive with holy moments.

We look for visions of heaven and we never dream that all the time God is in the commonplace things and people around us.

Where there is faith there is an awareness of holiness.

Time stands still best in moments that look suspiciously like ordinary life.

If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle.

Only miracle is plain; it is in the ordinary that groans with the weight of glory.

God is not in heaven - God is in the present moment. If you are also in the present moment you enter the temple.

Awe enables us to see in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple, to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.