Jonathan Sacks 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.

Happiness is not made by what we own. It is what we share.

Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.

I believe faith is not certainty but the courage to live with uncertainty.

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.

Anti-Semitism is best understood as a virus. It has no logic. Jews were hated because they were rich and because they were poor; because they were capitalists and because they were communists; because they held tenaciously to an ancient faith and because they were rootless cosmopolitans, believing nothing. Hate needs no logic. It is a sickness of the soul.

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

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

There's always hope. You can lose everything else in the world, but Jews never lose hope.

When money rules, we remember the price of things and forget the value of things, and that is dangerous.

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

Follow your passion. Nothing - not wealth, success, accolades or fame - is worth spending a lifetime doing things you don't enjoy.

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

Why did God create mankind? Because God likes stories.

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

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

The idols of today are unmistakable - self-esteem without achievement, sex without consequences, wealth without responsibility, pleasure without struggle and experience without commitment.

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.

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

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.

In Judaism faith means wrestling with God as Jacob once wrestled with an angel.

Part of the beauty of Judaism, and surely this is so for other faiths also, is that it gently restores control over time. Three times a day we stop what we are doing and turn to God in prayer. We recover perspective. We inhale a deep breath of eternity.

The greatest single antidote to violence is conversation.

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?

The Jewish festival of freedom is the oldest continuously observed religious ritual in the world. Across the centuries, Passover has never lost its power to inspire the imagination of successive generations of Jews with its annually re-enacted drama of slavery and liberation.