C

CARE

Who does not care has no care.

CATHEDRAL

The most imposing cathedrals are never too far from slums.

CAUSALITY

There are two causes of every effect; the visible one, and the real one.

CAUSE

It is a Cause that separates men from the mere mass.

CABBALAH

The secret book of Hebrew tradition had no single author, nor had Torah nor Talmud. Its many authors wrote with sagacity which was not theirs but rather the reflection of the Divine Intellect they venerated.

The Cabbalah teaches that in the realm of cognition and inner being there are ten different spheres. Not even all those who speak for truth see it on the same level.

CALMNESS

Let not the calm of indifference be mistaken for a mastered temper!

CANDOR

Some who wouldn’t suffer a breeze delight in sending forth a tempest.

Candor is insolence in a Sunday suit.

CAPITALISM

Has the rich and the poor; Communism, the poor and the poorer.

I would rather take capitalism without a soul than Communism without a heart.

CEREMONY

Is the outward sign of an inward duty. Some who deride ceremonials are merely covering up the tracks of their own egotism.

CHABAD

To understand the forces of the world is not enough. To gain access to the creative powers, the Cabbalah teaches, one must have wisdom and intuition (chochma and bina). Only the three combined—chochma, bina, da-at (chabad)—raise man above the material world.

CHANGE

Friends, work, leisure, convictions—man moves in a circle. Happy the man who can when need be jump his track for a wider orbit.

You may change man’s conduct but not his conscience.

No man is the same for more than a fortnight.

CHANCE

Throws people together, man and woman, friend and foe. Chance makes kin and kings, a turned-up nose or a dusky skin, and places one’s cradle in a mansion or a tent in the desert. From this unsorted mixture in the caldron of fate man draws his lot, his life and his luck. Yet some still like to think their dish was set out for them with deliberate intent by a providential hand.

CHARACTER

Is hard to determine, there are so many layers of pretense and prejudice hiding the core. Scratch the surface and you’ll find the good are not so good, the bad not so bad.

Character gets no better with age, only more pronounced.

Character shows its color by our sins, not our virtues. The latter are too bland and lily-like.

Suffering may not make character, but kindness will.

Character must be seen in everyday life, not just in its Sunday best.

Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you what you are.

It is when a man is in power that he shows his true direction and the measure of his patience.

CHARITY

Is not the effect of faith, it is faith.

Charity is the common denominator of all religions.

There is no charity so noble the cynic cannot impugn its motivation.

CHASTITY

Is honorable but charity is virtue come alive.

CHEERFULNESS

May be only a mood, but one for the better.

CHILDHOOD

The premature fruit may be much inferior to the slowly ripening.

CHILDREN

Perpetuate the prejudices and superstitions of their parents, rarely their wisdom.

The newborn starts off with a score of notches on which to hang the good things in life. Watch the community load him with prejudice, malice and superstition.

The wondrous adventures a child’s mind can experience on a walk through a deserted, littered lot set between two old houses!

Our ancestors called their newborn boy Kaddish, the Holy One. The child was their link to living eternity. Those who spend their existence without a child have no share in the fate of tomorrow’s world. They circle around themselves with their backs to the future generations.

To a child, its games of make-believe are as serious as our realities are to us. I sometimes wonder which of the two has more substance.

There are no children, only young people.

CHOICE

At so many crossroads it’s not a choice between good and bad, but between evil and greater evil.

CHOSEN PEOPLE

The pagans and gentiles begrudge the Jews their claim to a heritage which they themselves have been rejecting for thousands of years.

The Jews chose God when no one else wanted Him.

The Lord is not selective; the people are.

CHRIST

The greatest number of books have been written about one whom we know the least: Jesus Christ.

One cannot be a Christian while living the life of a pagan. If your heart is pagan and your deeds are pagan, you remain outside the Circle of Christ, which means Church of Christ, no matter what prayers your lips speak, nor what the ikon before which you kneel.

The Jews always have denied and forever will oppose the concept of God besides God. God is Echod, and One stands eternally for no more and no less, no picture of Him, no son of Him. This philosophy unendingly separates Judaism from Christianity.

If He came to earth today, He would never forgive us, in all His celestial beatitude, for the unspeakable atrocities perpetrated on His kin and the kin of His mother and His faithful believers. All the paternosters and all the hymns of all fifty thousand saints and all fifty thousand theologians and all the genuflecting of a billion Christian knees, those alive today and those interred since the night of the catacombs, could not wear away the Jewish blood that is on Christian hands. If Jesus came to earth today, He would shrink from the Gothic cathedrals and the forest of church spires that carry the cross He took upon Himself that man might live a loving creature. Perhaps He would slink away to some little ghetto street in New York City, where there is a tiny ten-by-ten synagogue. And He would sit down with the other bearded Jews on the hard benches in this true house of worship. And He would read with the others from the ancient book of Moses, which, as He said, He came to fulfill and not to destroy—the book of Moses, written in the script He could understand, written in the spirit in which He lived and for which He died.

God lived with the world and its people for a million years before Jesus was born, so why begin time with the Son of God? Why not with God, the Father? There must have been good and evil before Christ came to earth; there must have been sin and repentance, devotion and derision, helpfulness and viciousness, manliness and gentleness and godliness; there must have been saints and thieves, Falstaffs and ascetics, foul men and sound men, naïve men and critics, the Lord’s servants and the Devil’s henchmen.

There was a God before Jesus.

Millions have died for Him, but only a few lived for Him.

Jesus may have risen, but His followers stayed down.

It is the same family in Little Rock that genuflects to Christ in front of the altar and to Satan in front of the schoolhouse.

They suffer the cross He bore and go forth to impose His pains upon others.

If His followers had been won by the point of a sentence instead of a sword, Europe’s history were less sanguinary.

CHRISTIANS

Have failed for two thousand years to prove what Christ’s teachings could do. From auto-da-fé to Auschwitz, a chain of Miserabilia. Nowhere else in history were such saintly words turned to such abuse.

CHURCHES

Are like umbrellas: a torn one is still better than none.

Churches have lost the touch of the Divine and turned to book reviews and politics.

CITIES

Are like people: some are noisy and soon forgotten, others live on for a hundred generations after their homes and temples and streets are covered by silent sands.

CIVIL RIGHTS

Those who strain to hear a whisper from freedom infringed in our country seem to have a deaf ear for the screams of freedom outraged abroad.

Civil rights do not include the privilege of undermining the inherent civility of democratic society.

Civil rights are limited by civil duties.

CIVILIZATION

Can be judged by the value it places on human life.

Civilization always seems to be at its peak to the present generation. I wonder what the ancients would say to our contemporary mass slaughters, torture and suppression.

CIVITAS DEI

The Lord will meet you halfway, but you must take the first step.

CLASSICS

The devotion to classicism is given to most great men. It is their deep-felt urge to strengthen themselves on the ancient eras of heroism, virtue and faith.

CLEANLINESS

Is a sign of respect for fellow man.

Cleanliness is a consideration for others rather than oneself. For that reason, uncivilized people commonly are unclean.

CLERGYMAN

The preacher should be outstanding in Divine, not public, relations.

CLEVERNESS

Will set the mind ajar; wisdom will set it at rest.

Cleverness is a poor substitute for understanding.

Cleverness is competitive, wisdom never.

Cleverness comes with the body, wisdom from the Lord.

COLOR

Man was made of clay. Clay is black or red, but never white. White man is a decadent creature, away from sun, wind and the sea.

COMFORT

Is the small benefit we derive for the most part from the deadly application of progress in science.

COMMUNISM

Welfare without liberty is only a plush form of enslavement.

Communism is less a creed than an escape of the frustrated failure.

Communism has driven off the captains of industry and replaced them with captains of demagogy.

Communism began by incarcerating the few to free the many, and then enchained the many to protect the few.

One of the great moral calamities perpetrated by the Communists is their having driven millions of persons to a flight into conformism, that is, phlegmatic acceptance of any and all directives coming from above without any wish for examination or criticism.

Let’s beware that in the struggle for the rights of man some not usurp the rights over man.

Masterminds expropriated the state in the name of the people, and then expropriated the people in the name of the state.

COMPANIONSHIP

No one can afford to go to hell in his own fashion; Hades admits sinners in pairs only.

COMPARISON

Is the mother of envy.

The great deeds are aroused by comparison. Free man endeavors to lead his life without comparison and thus without competition.

COMPASSION

Is the only one of the human emotions the Lord permitted Himself and it has carried the Divine flavor ever since.

Those who do not feel injustice done to others are not part of the play the Lord has been ever staging. They are mere walk-ons in the scenes of history.

It is a far cry from expressions of pity to acts of solidarity.

COMPETITION

This would be a more tolerable world to live in if men would merely go about their tasks instead of trying to be better than their fellow men.

COMPLIMENT

A trick coin carrying on its reverse the face of slander; a flip of circumstances, and there it is.

COMRADE

Watch out for the Utopian magician—he has an ax up his sleeve.

COMRADESHIP

What some refer to as unity is often but a bond of common hatreds and prejudices.

CONCEIT

The hill of progress is a baffling climb: at every turn, it seems, we have reached the top.

Conceit is the little man’s substitute for self-satisfaction.

CONFESSION

Without repentance will institutionalize failings and pay sin a reward for pausing to consider.

Confession of an old sin neither improves nor elevates man; the task lies in facing honestly your present failings and egocentricities.

CONFIDENCE

Will reform more transgressors than punishment.

CONFORMISM

In the land of the one-legged, the two-legged is a cripple.

Conforming with even an only suspected evil is the opportunist’s choice of the easy path instead of the right one.

CONQUEST

To conquer one’s lust may sober the libidinous; to conquer one’s hate is virtue itself.

CONSCIENCE

Human conscience is the only true moral guide, since all so-called ethical precepts, as well as religious commands, may be—and have been—turned as easily to evil as to good.

Conscience is not a soft pillow to sleep on but rather a bed of pangs and restlessness. Only the indolent can sleep when evil prowls in the night.

CONSISTENCY

Is the program of dull minds.

CONSOLATION

At its deepest is silent.

CONSPIRACY

Ours is an age of conspiracy; no more is it the bulging prowess, the sharper blade, or the bluer strain of blood that claims a crown. It is the cunning tongue that sets a tyrant on the throne.

CONSTANCY

It is easier to be constant in hate than in love.

CONSTITUTION

A constitution is never better than those subscribing to it.

Some of the worst tyrannies, such as those of Russia and China, have been built on the under-structure of an almost perfect constitution.

A government is what it acts out, not what it pretends.

CONTENTMENT

Contentment is given only those who serve a cause.

Contentment forever eludes the seeker of self-satisfaction.

CONTROVERSY

Frequently divulges little about the issues at stake, but much about the motives of those disagreeing.

CONVERSATION

Fixed ideas are the roadblock on the path of discussion.

Conversation is only fruitful if all speak the same language.

Those who make conversation destroy it.

Conversation is sterile when motivated thinking dominates.

CONVERSION

The Jew who becomes a Christian or a Mohammedan or a Marxist because it admits him to a plush job in Vienna or Moscow, is like the rice-Christian in China—when the missionaries ran out of rice the Chinese ran out of Christianity.

There is no need to drop Judaism for Christianity. Jesus never left the Jewish fold, but many times did the Christians desert Jesus. God lives in the faith of man, not in his churches.

If you don’t find God in your own faith, you will not find Him in a borrowed one.

CONVERTS

Torquemada and Hitler have made more converts of Jews to Christianity than all the missionaries of all times put together. Only dread and the rack could make them change the Star for a Cross and those who changed have not made Jewry poorer nor Christendom richer.

CONVICTIONS

Precious few are the masters of their convictions, great is the number of those mastered by them.

He who says his convictions can never be shaken rarely stands on solid ground.

CORN

Truth is often corny; so is the staff of life.

COSMOGONY

They speak of the Origin of the Universe as if this tiny cosmos man sees were the Lord’s sole domain.

God lives in infinite mansions man can neither see nor comprehend, and He is Being in essence, not to be fathomed or judged by animal creatures.

Man hunts and searches on his whirling globe and whenever he unearths a miniature truth within his environ, he thinks himself close to the peak of science. But this very pinnacle itself is only a speck of dust on the infinite plain of God’s realm.

COSMOS

Physically, we are a swiftly deteriorating fungus settled on a dust particle whirling rhythmically in a black and empty barrel—I say “empty” because the distances between one tiny planet and the other are so gigantic that they are little different from stray, hardly visible dust-bits in an “empty” container.

And yet this fungus, riding for fleeting seconds on the dust of space, thinks his barrel a universe—nay, the universe.

COURAGE

If by some chance a true history of heroism were written, one would see a new array of faces that the world has kept in shadow: little men and women, from tents and huts and tiny flats, scrubwomen and peasants and clerks who suffered, sacrificed and gave their lives away for son or mother or friend. We have had a thousand histories of boisterous valiance, of herald, sword and crown—none yet of the humble carriers of the banner of courage.

Courage is the conquest of fear, or else nothing but devil-may-care.

Courage may sometimes be of doubtful issue, but cowardice never is.

Courage ennobles man. This is not a world of aristocrats.

It takes a few ribbons to make people die for their country. It takes much more to make them live for it.

COURTESY

May be a veneer, but neither is rudeness the real thing.

COURTIERS

Of old curveted about in the pageant of a monarch; today they strut in military tunics around the party boss.

COWARDS

May rise to heroism and heroes sink into oblivion, but dullards stay forever tepid.

CREATION

Is sudden evolvement—evolution is slow creation. The riddle of creative nature is still with us.

Creation is so difficult to conceive and yet more so to deny.

Some want us to believe the whole solar system grew out of an idly floating gas bubble. Still, whence the bubble?

The earth could not have been more dismal and dank before creation, when God moved on the face of the waters, than it is now. However, today through its formless bleakness runs a crimson thread.

The worm in the stomach may have guessed from which glands the juices spring, perhaps also how they change and mingle and curdle. He may even reckon he knows the secret of creation.

CRIME

Deserves punishment; however, our punishment is but another crime.

More crime is perpetrated within the law than without.

There are no great criminals, only greatly misfortuned individuals. All crimes fit all people under altered circumstances.

There is no crime so enormous that a better society could not have ameliorated it.

They hunt the thief with a stolen rooster and name cities after plunderers of a nation.

CRITIC

A eunuch judging a man’s lovemaking.

A skydreaming eagle without wings.

He lacks the courage to write; the critic’s box is safe.

A professional critic is like a professional mourner: his grievances are of dubious sincerity.

CRITICISM

Criticism is often furtive envy, veiled by dialectics.

CRITICS

Pygmies with poison darts live in the valley of the sleeping giants …

CRUELTY

Is not the beast in man, it is man in man. Animals know not cruelty, merely indifference.

Cruelty is the coward’s defense.

Although they know hunger and fear, dumb animals know no cruelty; it takes training to make man evil, snide and cruel.

CURIOSITY

Is nothing more than appetite. It is the subject of which they partake that makes the difference between cannibals and people: some persons are curious to watch hangings, other persons are curious about ancient lands.

CURTAIN RAISERS

Four men who raised the curtain masking the heart of man: Solomon, Socrates, Shakespeare, Spinoza.

CUSTOMS

Are man’s symbolic gestures to perpetuate his finest experiences in a world of fleeting time; the yearning for commemoration is the anguished urge to remain alive in the symbols of tradition.

CYNIC

Means “dog” in Greek; the Greeks had the word for it.

A cynic is worse than a fool. The fool lacks insight but has faith; the cynic lacks both, though his cloak of impudence covers this emptiness.

A cynic cannot see from here to tomorrow.