Maurice S. Friedman > Quotes

“The greatest mystery was not that we have been flung at random among the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.”
― Maurice Friedman

“Today, the tempter does not lead the creative man to a high mountain to show him all the kingdoms and splendor of the world, as Satan did to Jesus. Instead, he tempts him through infinity—to lose himself in the unessential, to roam about in the great confusion in which all human clarity and definiteness has ceased. Thus, the threat of infinity that Buber experienced as a fourteen-year-old now takes on new form—the form of formlessness, of the whirl of unmastered possibilities that every young person who goes out into the world experiences, but that Buber himself experienced to an overwhelming degree.”
― Maurice S. Friedman, Encounter on the Narrow Ridge: A Life of Martin Buber