When we steep our hearts in lovingkindness, we are able to sleep easily, to awaken easily, and to have pleasant dreams. To have self-respect in life, to walk through this life with grace and confidence, means having a commitment to nonharming and to loving care. If we do not have these things, we can neither rest nor be at peace; we are always fighting against ourselves. The feelings we create by harming are painful both for ourselves and for others. Thus, harming leads to guilt, tension, and complexity. But living a clear and simple life, free from resentment, fear, and guilt, extends into our sleeping, dreaming, and waking.

My religion is love. My method is Judaism as I define it for myself. Won’t this weaken community if we each define Judaism for ourselves? Maybe, but who cares? My goal is love not branded community. If I am loving, I will find others who are the same. Love will be our bond, and we will welcome any brand that serves it.

One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.

So if you want to help almost anyone under almost any circumstances — as a friend, husband or wife, teacher, therapist, store clerk or waiter — find it in your heart to treasure the people you meet. Find in yourself and then in them that which is best about being human, that which is special and unique to human life, that which is sacred and, if you so choose, that which is of God. Offer that possibility to another human being — that they are beings of such great worth — and you will not only have helped them, you will have offered them the possibility of a life as good as possible on this Earth. And as you bring out the best in yourself to bring out the best in them, you will have no doubt that loving human relationship is the heart of everything good and everything that heals in our lives.

This is the true joy in life - being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.