Jonathan Sacks famous quotes

The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Space #Differences #Different

Make space in your life for the things that matter, for family and friends, love and generosity, fun and joy. Without this, you will burn out in mid-career and wonder where your life went.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Fun #Careers #Space

Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Football #Years #Occupation

No great achiever - even those who made it seem easy - ever succeeded without hard work.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Hard Work #Motivational Work #Easy

We are biological creatures. We are born, we live, we die. There is no transcendent purpose to existence. At best we are creatures of reason, and by using reason we can cure ourselves of emotional excess. Purged of both hope and fear, we find courage in the face of helplessness, insignificance and uncertainty.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Emotional #Faces #Purpose

Peace can be agreed around the conference table, but unless it grows in ordinary hearts and minds, it does not last. It may not even begin
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Heart #Mind #Ordinary

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the holy of holies of Jewish time. It is that rarest of phenomena, a Jewish festival without food. Instead it is a day of fasting and prayer, introspection and self-judgment when, collectively and repeatedly, we confess our sins and pray to be written into God's Book of Life.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Prayer #Book #Self

True freedom requires the rule of law and justice, and a judicial system in which the rights of some are not secured by the denial of rights to others.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Rights #Law #Justice

A society in which there are high levels of voluntary activity will simply be a better, happier place than one where there are not.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Levels

Find people not to envy but to admire. Do not the profitable but the admirable deed. Live by ideals.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#People #Envy #Deeds

God has given us many faiths but only one world in which to co-exist. May your work help all of us to cherish our commonalities and feel enlarged by our differences.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Differences #Tolerance #May

Close to a billion people - one-eighth of the world's population - still live in hunger. Each year 2 million children die through malnutrition. This is happening at a time when doctors in Britain are warning of the spread of obesity. We are eating too much while others starve.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Children #Years #Doctors

Religious ritual is a way of structuring time so that we, not employers, the market or the media, are in control. Life needs its pauses, its chapter breaks, if the soul is to have space to breathe.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Religious #Space #Media

Freedom begins with what we teach our children. That is why Jews became a people whose passion is education, whose heroes are teachers and whose citadels are schools.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Teacher #Children #Hero

Just as the natural environment depends on biodiversity, so the human environment depends on cultural diversity, because no one civilization encompasses all the spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions of mankind.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Spiritual #Expression #Civilization

The supreme religious challenge is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Religious #Challenges

Values are tapes we play on the Walkman of the mind: any tune we choose so long as it does not disturb others.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Play #Long #Mind

God's forgiveness allows us to be honest with ourselves. We recognize our imperfections, admit our failures, and plead to God for clemency.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Imperfection #Honest #Being Honest

Those who believe that liberal democracy and the free market can be defended by the force of law and regulation alone, without an internalised sense of duty and morality, are tragically mistaken.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Believe #Law #Democracy

The world we build tomorrow is born in the stories we tell our children today. Politics moves the pieces. Education changes the game.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Children #Moving #Games

To defend a country you need an army, but to defend a civilization you need education.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Country #Army #Civilization

The meaning of the universe lies outside the universe.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Lying #Universe

Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Three #Answers #Persons

A perfect storm is in the making: financial uncertainty, economic downturn, government cuts, rising unemployment and a future that looks less clear the more we try to fathom it.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Cutting #Government #Perfect

While we can remember the past, we cannot write the future. Only our children, the future of our community, can do that.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Children #Writing #Past

We need to rediscover the idea of the common good and work together to build a home.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Home #Ideas #Together

The royals - all of them, especially Prince Philip and Prince Charles - have done outstanding work with the faith communities.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Community #Done #Royal

Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Past #Government #Gaps

Dreams are where we visit the many lands and landscapes of human possibility and discover the one where we feel at home. The great religious leaders were all dreamers.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Dream #Religious #Home

Europe is dying. That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Talking #Europe #Dying

Europe today is the most secular region in the world. Europe is the only region in the world experiencing population decline. Wherever you turn today the more religious the community, the larger on average are their families.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Religious #Average #Europe

Food prices are often kept artificially high. The result is that the Millennium Development Goals set out by the United Nations at the start of the new millennium are not being reached. Fine words have not yet been turned into deeds.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Goal #Development #Deeds

If we are to negotiate the coming years safely, we may need a new kind of leadership. To put it more precisely, we need the rediscovery of an ancient kind of leadership that has rarely been given the prominence it deserves. I mean the leader as teacher.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Teacher #Mean #Years

In her religious role, the Queen is head of the Church of England, but in her civic role she cares for all her subjects, and no one is better at making everyone she meets feel valued.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Religious #Queens #Church

In the post-enlightenment Europe of the 19th century the highest authority was no longer the Church. Instead it was science. Thus was born racial anti-Semitism, based on two disciplines regarded as science in their day - the 'scientific study of race' and the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Europe #Two #Race

The market economy is very good at wealth creation but not perfect at all about wealth distribution.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#Perfect #Wealth #Creation

The Holocaust survivors are among the most inspiring people I have had the privilege to meet.
-- Jonathan Sacks

#People #Holocaust #Survivor