At issue was the question whether this man's faith could prevail against a man whose equal faith it was that this society is sick beyond saving and that mercy itself pleads for its swift extinction and replacement by another.
More recently as faith gave way to materialism anti-Semitism assumed a secular mode harnessing itself to the dominant ideologies of both the Left and the Right.
Jews survived all the defeats expulsions persecutions and pogroms the centuries in which they were regarded as a pariah people even the Holocaust itself because they never gave up the faith that one day they would be free to live as Jews without fear.
Religious belief like history itself is a story that is always unfolding always subject to inquiry and ripe for questioning. For without doubt there is no faith.
Act strenuously would appear to be our faith and right thinking will take care of itself.
By gold all good faith has been banished by gold our rights are abused the law itself is influenced by gold and soon there will be an end of every modest restraint.
Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
If he have faith the believer cannot be restrained. He betrays himself. He breaks out. He confesses and teaches this gospel to the people at the risk of life itself.
I simply don't believe in failure. In itself it doesn't exist. We create it. We make ourselves fail.
We can't have a failure in Iraq but we also can't be there for the next 10 years because if we are it's going to become I think a failure in and of itself.
What matters is this: Being fearless of failure arms you to break the rules. In doing so you may change the culture and just possibly for a moment change life itself.
America thinks of itself as a meritocracy so people have more respect for success and more contempt for failure.
In tennis it is not the opponent you fear it is the failure itself knowing how near you were but just out of reach.
So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.
A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.
Our failings sometimes bind us to one another as closely as could virtue itself.
Existence itself does not feel horrible it feels like an ecstasy rather which we have only to be still to experience.
Intuition is the very force or activity of the soul in its experience through whatever has been the experience of the soul itself.
Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact till it does that it hardly is experience.
All I know is that history repeats itself and people are going to want to experience the world. But I know then they are going to have a better appreciation for what is here in Maine.
The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing infinite in its variety sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.
The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter in mind and as mind in emotion as emotion etc.
Just as the wave cannot exist for itself but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean so must I never live my life for itself but always in the experience which is going on around me.
My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus with the flash of one hurried glance it attained to the vision of That Which Is.