Quotes By Lionel Blue

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

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

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.

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

To change, to convert? Why bother?

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

So many plusses, so many minuses.

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

It's more fun to watch without joining in.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have begun to sympathetically understand Paul, though I don't like him much.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I was not comfortable worshipping another Jew.

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.

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

Someone gave me a New Testament. I had never before read it systematically. Some parts made sense, some parts shocked me.

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

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.

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

Some of the parables of the Kingdom made wonderful sense, but the exclusivity in the New Testament put me off.

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

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