Quotes By Lionel Blue

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

This Christian poison hasn't stopped yet.

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

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

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

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

It is not possible to unknow what you do know - the result of that is fanaticism.

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

To change, to convert? Why bother?

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

Christianity had two faces which bewildered me - two pictures which didn't fit.

The real evidence is not practically speaking in scholarship but in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practising Christians. Their lives are the proofs of their beliefs.

Good things come, and I'm not just referring to riding the buses.

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

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.

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

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 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 still go to a Christian priory for retreats.

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.

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 was not comfortable worshipping another Jew.

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