Moses Famous Quotes

God likes to make people. Great people out of common people, strong people out of week people, famous people out of the unknown people, good people are bad people. God likes to make people. That's an obsession with God, one from which He will never change.

It turns out that the famous dictum, associated with Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, can run both ways: yes, without God everything is theoretically permissible... but believers can find ways to use God to justify just about anything as well.

Every man, the moment he takes his eye off God, has failed. Every man has been a failure at some period of his life. Abraham failed. Moses failed. Elijah failed. Take the men that have become so famous and that were so mighty—the moment they got their eye off God, they were weak like other men; and it is a very singular thing that those men failed on the strongest point in their character. I suppose it was because they were not on the watch. Abraham

But I rather like being infamous. If you're a nobody, you're just a nobody. If you're famous, they erect a statue of you and pigeons crap on your head. But if you're infamous, you're somebody without having to put up with pigeon crap. - Phinizy Mosely

It was necessary, therefore, to Moses that he should find the people of Israel in Egypt enslaved and oppressed by the Egyptians, in order that they should be disposed to follow him so as to be delivered out of bondage. It was necessary that Romulus should not remain in Alba, and that he should be abandoned at his birth, in order that he should become King of Rome and founder of the fatherland. It was necessary that Cyrus should find the Persians discontented with the government of the Medes, and the Medes soft and effeminate through their long peace. Theseus could not have shown his ability had he not found the Athenians dispersed. These opportunities, therefore, made those men fortunate, and their high ability enabled them to recognize the opportunity whereby their country was ennobled and made famous.

Working hard is important. But more effort does not necessarily yield more results. “Less but better” does. Ferran Adrià, arguably the world’s greatest chef, who has led El Bulli to become the world’s most famous restaurant, epitomizes the principle of “less but better” in at least two ways. First, his specialty is reducing traditional dishes to their absolute essence and then re-imagining them in ways people have never thought of before. Second, while El Bulli has somewhere in the range of 2 million requests for dinner reservations each year, it serves only fifty people per night and closes for six months of the year. In fact, at the time of writing, Ferran had stopped serving food altogether and had instead turned El Bulli into a full-time food laboratory of sorts where he was continuing to pursue nothing but the essence of his craft.1 Getting used to the idea of “less but better” may prove harder than it sounds, especially when we have been rewarded in the past for doing more … and more and more. Yet at a certain point, more effort causes our progress to plateau and even stall. It’s true that the idea of a direct correlation between results and effort is appealing. It seems fair. Yet research across many fields paints a very different picture. Most people have heard of the “Pareto Principle,” the idea, introduced as far back as the 1790s by Vilfredo Pareto, that 20 percent of our efforts produce 80 percent of results. Much later, in 1951, in his Quality-Control Handbook, Joseph Moses Juran, one of the fathers of the quality movement, expanded on this idea and called it “the Law of the Vital Few.”2 His observation was that you could massively improve the quality of a product by resolving a tiny fraction of the problems. He found a willing test audience for this idea in Japan, which at the time had developed a rather poor reputation for producing low-cost, low-quality goods. By adopting a process in which a high percentage of effort and attention was channeled toward improving just those few things that were truly vital, he made the phrase “made in Japan” take on a totally new meaning. And gradually, the quality revolution led to Japan’s rise as a global economic power.3

According to a legend preserved in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the tormented nymph Io, when released from Argus by Hermes, fled, in the form of a cow, to Egypt; and there, according to a later legend, recovering her human form, gave birth to a son identified as Serapis, and Io became known as the goddess Isis. The Umbrian master Pinturicchio (1454–1513) gives us a Renaissance version of her rescue, painted in 1493 on a wall of the so-called Borgia Chambers of the Vatican for the Borgia Pope Alexander VI (Fig. 147). Figure 147. Isis with Hermes Trismegistus and Moses (fresco, Renaissance, Vatican, 1493) Pinturicchio shows the rescued nymph, now as Isis, teaching, with Hermes Trismegistus at her right hand and Moses at her left. The statement implied there is that the two variant traditions are two ways of rendering a great, ageless tradition, both issuing from the mouth and the body of the Goddess. This is the biggest statement you can make of the Goddess, and here we have it in the Vatican—that the one teaching is shared by the Hebrew prophets and Greek sages, derived, moreover, not from Moses’s God,17 but from that goddess of whom we read in the words of her most famous initiate, Lucius Apuleius (born c. a.d. 125): I am she that is the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of the powers divine, queen of all that are in hell, the principal of them that dwell in heaven, manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses. At my will the planets of the sky, the wholesome winds of the seas, and the lamentable silences of hell are disposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout the world, in divers manners, in variable customs, and by many names.

The same lesson can be learned from one of the most widely read books in history: the Bible. What is the Bible “about”? Different people will of course answer that question differently. But we could all agree the Bible contains perhaps the most influential set of rules in human history: the Ten Commandments. They became the foundation of not only the Judeo-Christian tradition but of many societies at large. So surely most of us can recite the Ten Commandments front to back, back to front, and every way in between, right? All right then, go ahead and name the Ten Commandments. We’ll give you a minute to jog your memory . . . . . . . . . . . . Okay, here they are:        1. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.        2. You shall have no other gods before Me.        3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.        4. Remember the Sabbath day, to make it holy.        5. Honor your father and your mother.        6. You shall not murder.        7. You shall not commit adultery.        8. You shall not steal.        9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.       10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, nor your neighbor’s wife . . . nor any thing that is your neighbor’s. How did you do? Probably not so well. But don’t worry—most people don’t. A recent survey found that only 14 percent of U.S. adults could recall all Ten Commandments; only 71 percent could name even one commandment. (The three best-remembered commandments were numbers 6, 8, and 10—murder, stealing, and coveting—while number 2, forbidding false gods, was in last place.) Maybe, you’re thinking, this says less about biblical rules than how bad our memories are. But consider this: in the same survey, 25 percent of the respondents could name the seven principal ingredients of a Big Mac, while 35 percent could name all six kids from The Brady Bunch. If we have such a hard time recalling the most famous set of rules from perhaps the most famous book in history, what do we remember from the Bible? The stories. We remember that Eve fed Adam a forbidden apple and that one of their sons, Cain, murdered the other, Abel. We remember that Moses parted the Red Sea in order to lead the Israelites out of slavery. We remember that Abraham was instructed to sacrifice his own son on a mountain—and we even remember that King Solomon settled a maternity dispute by threatening to slice a baby in half. These are the stories we tell again and again and again, even those of us who aren’t remotely “religious.” Why? Because they stick with us; they move us; they persuade us to consider the constancy and frailties of the human experience in a way that mere rules cannot.

The famous law of punishment, “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” (Exodus 21:24), embodies the same principle in a specific juridical context. It was never intended as an excuse for personal vengeance but as a directive to judges making decisions regarding penalties in cases of injury (Exodus 21:22-25).

• I am that I am As Moses asked for his name, God's response to Moses was ‘Ham-Sah’ or ‘I am that I am’ according to the famous lines of the Hebrew Torah. ‘I am that I am’ reaffirms God's eternal existence which is all, where all that is the God of nature. Breathe in whilst meditating whilst saying ‘ham’. With that, you understand your identity and all you are-your perceptions, your thoughts, and your memories. Breathing out and trying to say ‘sa’ to identify with all that you are, with all that's there. Through their senses, feelings and experiences, the lives of those before you. • Aham-Prema The mantra is said to be ‘Aah-ham-pree-mah’. In ‘I am Divine Love’ it translates. Chanting this mantra, you surround yourself with divine love–all that is and can be unconditional love to you. These are the traits; acceptance, innocence, respect, admiration, love, thanks, forgiveness, empathy, feeling, unity. Aham Prema' is a simple mantra which should be repeated 108 times in a chant. This puts together, in harmony, spirit, body and soul. That will allow you to leave behind your history. It will clear your mind and give you focus from distraction. Aham Prema' will give you energy and fresh start. •

Rabbi Zimmerman is away this Shabbat morning, so Rabbi David Stern leads Chever Torah in his place. Rabbi Stern is young, handsome, and possessed of a lightning quick wit. He wears his hair in the style made famous by J.F.K. His energy is contagious. The morning's discussion accelerates as he asks a question worthy of Rashi, then paces back and forth in front of the hall grinning with delight as we answer and respond with questions of our own. But a few minutes later the rhythm flags inexplicably and we sit silently, staring at our Torahs. Rabbi Stern fires off another question. No one answers. He offers a provocative observation - something controversial to stir the pot. Still, we are silent. Finally, in frustration, he exclaims, "Come on people! Somebody disagree with me! How can we learn anything if no one will disagree?" We laugh. But it occurs to me that Rabbi Stern has offered the most profound observation of the day, and it is a very Jewish idea. Unfortunately, most theological conversations I have had in church have been the self-reinforcing kind: a group of people sitting around telling each other what everyone already believes. If some brave soul interjects a radical new idea or questions one of the group's firmly held views, it is usually an unpleasant experience. We shift in our seats uncomfortably until someone rises to the bait. The discussion remains civil, but it seems that any challenge to the groups' theology must be corrected, so all comments are solidly aimed at that one goal: arriving at a preconceived answer. Chever Torah has no such agenda. Or perhaps I should say all discussions have the same agenda: to explore the possibilities - all the possibilities.

The fact that the four strictest Commandments were not included would create public uproar. The potential moral shift that resulted would fall squarely on Thomas’s shoulders. As would any economic deterioration or escalation of tension in the Middle East. Yet he would become rich and famous. And any shadow that hung over his career as a result of the firing would be gone. The dilemma was simple. Should he place personal comfort and professional success first and risk unknown economic and religious stability? Or let the world rest, and sacrifice his financial and professional future?

Peter is a very interesting guy.  He is one of Jesus’ favorite people and a trusted friend.  He saw most of Jesus’ miracles firsthand and was trained by Him.  Peter was a Christian who knew Jesus was God and served Him in full-time Christian ministry, yet we see him make some unbelievable blunders.  He lacked faith, displayed when he sank in the water (Matt 14:31). He was prideful and thought he belonged with Jesus, Moses, and Elijah (Matt 17:4).  He famously denied Jesus three times (Mark 14:29-31), and even after Jesus was raised and the Holy Spirit had come, and Peter had become a mature leader in the Christian church, he had to be called out by the apostle Paul for refusing to even eat with Gentiles.  That one is particularly interesting because it’s exactly what a great deal of modern Christians do.  They refuse to eat with Gentiles.  Translation: Hang out with Democrats, go to rock concerts, have a beer with their coworkers, go to their neighborhood’s Halloween party.

allegorical interpretation. This was one of the most influential approaches to biblical interpretation until the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The roots of allegorical interpretation reach back to the Golden Age of Greece and, in early Jewish hermeneutics, to Philo Judeas. In the beginning centuries of the Christian church, allegorical interpretation was identified with the Alexandrian school and especially with its most famous scholar, *Origen. The key assumption in this hermeneutical approach is that the scriptural text contains several senses. The interpreter seeks to discover levels of meaning that lie beneath the literal sense of a text. The figure of Moses in the Exodus narrative, for example, can be interpreted allegorically as Jesus Christ, who comes to those enslaved in sin and leads them to salvation. Origen identified three primary senses: the literal, the moral and the spiritual. Later Latin fathers expanded the senses into four: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological (moral) and the anagogic (focusing on the end or the goal of the Christian life).

The Bible is relevant and real, and the people who inhabit its pages are people who have faced what you and I face. Life has disappointed them, others have disappointed them, and they have disappointed themselves. Just like us. Remarkably, amazingly and delightfully, these people are the people God uses. The disappointed ones. Sneaky and snarly people who often acted before they thought, who failed to act when they should have and sometimes didn’t act at all. Yet they were called friends of God. The man who named the people of Israel, Jacob, was a mama’s boy. The one who became brave enough to stand up to his wealthy adopted family and side with the oppressed immigrant workers, Moses, lived with a stubborn insecurity. Rahab, a woman whose circumstances led to her prostituting herself, became the one who helped establish a country for the “pure and holy” people of God. King David, famous for his devotion to God, gave into his voracious sexual appetites and passion. These are the ones God calls friends: people like the great prophet Elijah who struggled with depression, fear and a weird streak of pride that caused him to do an ugly power play over the fate of two little boys. Jonah, the prophet to the ancient city of Nineveh, who didn’t want to go because of his racism. John the Baptist, who would today likely be holed up in Idaho somewhere, living off his produce and writing treatises against the government and church.

Like the patient potter, God is willing to mold us again when we resist Him and damage our own lives. The famous Scottish preacher Alexander Whyte used to say that the victorious Christian life was a “series of new beginnings.” No failure in our lives need be fatal or final, although we certainly suffer for our sins. God gave new beginnings to Abraham, Moses, David, Jonah, and Peter when they failed, and He can do the same for us today.

Standing out from the (New York City) map's delicate tracery of gridirons representing streets are heavy lines, lines girdling the city or slashing across its expanses. These lines denote the major roads on which automobiles and trucks move, roads whose very location, moreover, does as much as any single factor to determine where and how a city's people live and work. With a single exception, the East River Drive, Robert Moses built every one of those roads. (...) Only one borough of New York City—the Bronx—is on the mainland of the United States, and bridges link the island boroughs that form metropolis. Since 1931, seven such bridges were built, immense structures, some of them anchored by towers as tall as seventy-story buildings, supported by cables made up of enough wire to drop a noose around the earth. (...) Robert Moses built every one of those bridges. (He also built) Lincoln Center, the world's most famous, costly and imposing cultural complex. Alongside another stands the New York Coliseum, the glowering exhibition tower whose name reveals Moses' preoccupation with achieving an immortality like that conferred on the Caesars of Rome. The eastern edge of Manhattan Island, heart of metropolis, was completely altered between 1945 and 1958. (...) Robert Moses was never a member of the Housing Authority and his relationship with it was only hinted at in the press. But between 1945 and 1958 no site for public housing was selected and no brick of a public housing project laid without his approval. And still further north along the East River stand the buildings of the United Nations headquarters. Moses cleared aside the obstacles to bringing to New York the closest thing to a world capitol the planet possesses, and he supervised its construction. When Robert Moses began building playgrounds in New York City, there were 119. When he stopped, there were 777. Under his direction, an army of men that at times during the Depression included 84,000 laborers. (...) For the seven years between 1946 and 1953, no public improvement of any type—not school or sewer, library or pier, hospital or catch basin—was built by any city agency, even those which Robert Moses did not directly control, unless Moses approved its design and location. To clear the land for these improvements, he evicted the city's people, not thousands of them or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands, from their homes and tore the homes down. Neighborhoods were obliterated by his edict to make room for new neighborhoods reared at his command. “Out from the heart of New York, reaching beyond the limits of the city into its vast suburbs and thereby shaping them as well as the city, stretch long ribbons of concrete, closed, unlike the expressways, to trucks and all commercial traffic, and, unlike the expressways, bordered by lawns and trees. These are the parkways. There are 416 miles of them. Robert Moses built every mile. (He also built the St. Lawrence Dam,) one of the most colossal single works of man, a structure of steel and concrete as tall as a ten-story apartment house, an apartment house as long as eleven football fields, a structure vaster by far than any of the pyramids, or, in terms of bulk, of any six pyramids together. And at Niagara, Robert Moses built a series of dams, parks and parkways that make the St. Lawrence development look small. His power was measured in decades. On April 18, 1924, ten years after he had entered government, it was formally handed to him. For forty-four years thereafter (until 1968), he held power, a power so substantial that in the field s in which he chose to exercise it, it was not challenged seriously by any (of 6) Governors of New York State or by any Mayor of New York City.

Before the famous story of Moses and the Israelites, it is said that Abraham the father of Arabs and Jews went to Egypt and found it to be well civilized.

• I am that I am As Moses asked for his name, God's response to Moses was ‘Ham-Sah’ or ‘I am that I am’ according to the famous lines of the Hebrew Torah. ‘I am that I am’ reaffirms God's eternal existence which is all, where all that is the God of nature. Breathe in whilst meditating whilst saying ‘ham’. With that, you understand your identity and all you are-your perceptions, your thoughts, and your memories. Breathing out and trying to say ‘sa’ to identify with all that you are, with all that's there. Through their senses, feelings and experiences, the lives of those before you. • Aham-Prema The mantra is said to be ‘Aah-ham-pree-mah’. In ‘I am Divine Love’ it translates. Chanting this mantra, you surround yourself with divine love–all that is and can be unconditional love to you. These are the traits; acceptance, innocence, respect, admiration, love, thanks, forgiveness, empathy, feeling, unity. Aham Prema' is a simple mantra which should be repeated 108 times in a chant. This puts together, in harmony, spirit, body and soul. That will allow you to leave behind your history. It will clear your mind and give you focus from distraction. Aham Prema' will give you energy and fresh start. • Ho’oponopono It is an old Hawaiian word, declared ‘ho-oh-pono-pono’. The meaning is: ‘I love you; I'm sorry; excuse me, please; thank you’. People who find themselves overcome with feelings of anger, guilt, which have problems caused by complicated interpersonal relationships who find themselves unable to express their feelings about their loved ones are chosen to do so. People who feel wrong and find it hard to obtain forgiveness for themselves. It opens your heart to say ‘I love you’. Saying ‘I'm sorry’ makes you calm. Saying ‘Please forgive me’ accepts your imperfections and expresses your thanks for saying' thank you.' The chant will cure your karmic effect and give you a chance to start fresh.

Rabbi Zusha of Hanipoli (eighteenth century) was famous for his simple faith. Many stories are told about him, but perhaps the best · known relates his response to students who asked why his teachings were different from those of his own teacher. Zusha's answer was: "When I come before the judges of the heavenly tribunal, they are not going to ask if I lived my life like Moses, or if I lived my life like Abraham. They are going to ask me if I lived my life to be the best Zusha I could be.

2:32. six hundred three thousand five hundred fifty. Add to this the underage and elderly men, the women of all ages, and the Levites, and the total number of Israelites must approach two million. It has been calculated that by these numbers, marching eight across, when the first Israelites reach Mount Sinai, half of them would still be in Egypt! The extraordinary size of this population is a famous old problem in traditional and critical biblical scholarship. The numbers appear far too high; but they do not appear to be entirely invented either, because what would be the motive for contriving them in all of this tribe-by-tribe detail for the first four chapters of Numbers? Some suggest that the word for "thousand" here means rather a "clan," but that is not correct (see the comment on Num 3:43). One possibility is that these are the numbers from the census that is attributed to King David (2 Samuel 24; see the comment in Exod 30:12). (There are just three censuses in the Tanak, the two censuses of Moses and the census of David.) Coming centuries later, in a period in which Israel is settled in the land, the numbers are more understandable in the Davidic era (though they are questionably high even for that period). In this scenario, the records here would have come from old documents among the archives which would have come to be mixed in with documents that were used as sources for the Torah.

Death and life are two sides of the same coin; you cannot have one without the other. Each time you surrender, each time you trust the dying, your faith is led to a deeper level and you discover a Larger Self underneath. You decide not to push yourself to the front of the line, and something much better happens in the back of the line. You let go of your narcissistic anger, and you find that you start feeling much happier. You surrender your need to control your partner, and finally the relationship blossoms or ends. Yet each time it is a choice—and each time it is a kind of dying. It seems we only know what life is when we know what death is. The mystics and great saints were those who had learned to trust and allow this pattern, and often said in effect, “What did I ever lose by dying?” Or try Paul’s famous one-liner: “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). Now even scientific studies, including those of near-death experiences, reveal the same universal pattern. Things change and grow by dying to their present state, but each time it is a risk. We always wonder, “Will it work this time?” So many academic disciplines are coming together, each in their own way, to say that there’s a constant movement of loss and renewal at work in this world at every level. It seems to be the pattern of all growth and evolution. To be alive means to surrender to this inevitable flow. It’s the same pattern in every atom, in every human relationship, and in every galaxy. Indigenous peoples, Hindu gurus, Buddha, Moses, Muhammad, and Jesus all saw it clearly in human history and named it as a kind of “necessary dying.” If this pattern is true, it has been true all the time and everywhere. Such seeing did not just start two thousand years ago. All of us have to eventually learn to let go of something smaller so something bigger can happen. But that’s not a religion—it’s highly visible truth. It is the Way Reality Works. Yes, I am saying that the way things work and Christ are one and the same. This is not a religion to be either fervently joined or angrily rejected. It is a train ride already in motion. The tracks are visible everywhere. You can be a willing and happy traveler. Or not.

For this reason the famous Hasidic story of Rabbi Zusya remains so important for us today: Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?

the life of Jesus recapitulates key elements in the earlier story of Israel. For a moment, as Jesus stands on the mountain giving the famous sermon, he is Moses. For a moment, answering his critics about his actions on the sabbath, he is David. For a moment, as he calls and names the twelve disciples, he is perhaps Jacob, bringing the twelve patriarchs into the world. For a moment, healing the sick and raising the dead, he is Elijah or Elisha. And so on. In the transfiguration he actually meets Moses and Elijah.