Lionel Blue Quotes

My mother enjoyed old age, and because of her I've begun to enjoy parts of it too. So far I've had it good and am crumbling nicely.

In speaking of Jesus, I must speak about Christianity because I do not think it possible or profitable to divide the two.

On the way to work good-hearted young girls sometimes offer me their seats, which I accept and bless them in return, a transaction satisfying to all concerned.

If a dish doesn't turn out right, change the name and don't bat an eyelid. A fallen souffle is only a risen omelette. It depends on the self-confidence with which you present it.

I once asked God what I could give him. "Your problems," he said. "I've got everything else.

The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.

I thought of such Christian inventions as the ghetto and the Jewish badge of shame. The Nazis didn't have to go very far to pick up their know-how.

I feel that the Christian experience and the Jewish one have much to give each other. If this open society continues and there is no return to political anti-Semitism, then this encounter, deeper than any theology, may happen.

When you do a good turn you feel rich, even if you are broke.

Jews are just like everyone else, only more so.

I found that when I did something for the sake of heaven, heaven happened. These things changed my life. I owe them to my encounter with Christianity.

I didn't want to be on the losing side. I was fed up with Jewish weakness, timidity and fear. I didn't want any more Jewish sentimentality and Jewish suffering. I was sickened by our sad songs.

To my surprise, my 70s are nicer than my 60s and my 60s than my 50s, and I wouldn't wish my teens and 20s on my enemies.

I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.

I am pleased now that I have lived in a gay as well as a religious ghetto, though it hasn't been very comfortable. Taken together, their limitations cancel each other out and I have seen the world more kindly and more honestly.

For a Christian, Jesus is the unique and only way that God has fully revealed himself. For a Jew this cannot be.

For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.

To change, to convert? Why bother?

I began to see that my problems, seen spiritually, were really my soul's plusses.

I have ended as a Reform Rabbi, grateful to Christianity for so many good things.

I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can't be learnt in lecture halls.

I was not comfortable worshipping another Jew.

Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again.

Old friends die on you, and they're irreplaceable. You become dependent.

My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charleston.

I was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay.

For a devotee or lover, the being, worshipped or loved, will always be the only one for her or him.

The real evidence for Jesus and Christianity is in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practicing Christians.

Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity.

Because of my Marxism, I was not into myths or miracles, whether it was the virgin birth, the physical resurrection or casting out demons from an epileptic.

It was admitted by the early rabbis that the sectarians could be as full of good works as eggs were full of meat.

What would I have done if I'd been put to the test? Would I have risked my own life for people I hardly knew? Probably, I would have looked the other way at best or become another apologist for evil at worst.

Discrimination against Jews can be read in Thomas Aquinas, and insults against Jews in Martin Luther.

An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!

The Christian use of religion as a personal love affair both shocked me, and attracted me.

I was not allowed a physical lover. Falling in love with Love was the best I could get.

I recovered my infant Judaism, but in a reformist version.

It's more fun to watch without joining in.

At religious instruction classes, I encountered The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, and the sincerity of the traveller in that book was overwhelming.

Praying privately in churches, I began to discover that heaven was my true home and also that it was here and now, woven into this life.

During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.

This Christian poison hasn't stopped yet.

I still go to a Christian priory for retreats.