Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes

It is of the essence of virtue that the good is not to be done for the sake of a reward.

Then comes the insight that All is God. One still realizes that the world is as it was, but it does not matter, it does not affect one's faith.

With information we are alone; in appreciation we are with all things.

Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows
with the ability to say no to oneself.

Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.

Self-sufficiency, independence, the capacity to stand apart, to differ, to resist, and to defy-all are modes of being human.

The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.

Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you.

He who is satisfied has never truly craved, and he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor.

no man is free who is not a master of himself, that the more liberties we enjoy, the more discipline we need.46 Laissez-faire,

Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society.

Speech has power. Words do not fade. What starts out as a sound, ends in a deed.

The test of love is in how one relates not to saints and scholars but to rascals.

Knowledge-like the sky- is never private property. No teacher has a right to withhold it from anyone who asks for it. Teaching is the art of sharing.

Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.

(People achieve) fullness of being in fellowship, in care for others.

The road to the sacred leads through the secular.

Self-respect is the fruit of discipline.

To be or not to be is not the question, the vital question is how to be and how not to be ...

To serve does not mean to surrender but to share.

When we pray, we bring G-d into the world

Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature.

Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.

We worship God through our questions.

In any free society where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty - all are responsible.

The opposite of good is not evil, the opposite of good is indifference,

A prophet's true greatness is his ability to hold God and man in a single thought.

When I marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.

Few are guilty, but all are responsible.

The essence of man is not what he is, but in what he is able to be.

Philosophy, to be relevant, must offer us a wisdom to live by.

The work on weekdays and the rest on the seventh day are correlated. The Sabbath is the inspirer, the other days the inspired.

All events are secretly interrelated; the sweep of all we are doing reaches beyond the horizon of our comprehension.

Short is the way from need to greed.

(People) can never attain fulfillment, or sense of meaning, unless it is shared, unless it pertains to other human beings.

Life is not meaningful ... unle ss it is serving an end beyond itself; unless it is of value to someone else.

How embarrassing for man to be the greatest miracle on earth and not to understand it!

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.

Faith like Job's cannot be shaken becasue it is the result of having been shaken.

Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.

Labor is a blessing, toil is the misery of man.

The problem to be faced is: how to combine loyalty to one's own tradition with reverence for different traditions.

Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds.

Ultimately there is no power to narcissistic, self-indulgent thinking. Authentic thinking originates with an encounter with the world.

God is not nice. God is not an uncle. God is an earthquake.

We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate negroes ... The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.

The Sabbath is the day on which we learn the art of surpassing civilization.

Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.

The course of life is unpredictable no one can write his autobiography in advance.

There is happiness in the love of labor, there is misery in the love of gain.

Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions.

God is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance.

The degree to which one is sensitive to other people's suffering, to other (people's) humanity, is the index of one's own humanity

Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.

We can all do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments.

Prayer begins where our power ends.

Man's sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God.

To pray is to dream in league with God, to envision His holy visions.

The worship of reason is arrogance and betrays a lack of intelligence. The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith.

The tragedy of religion is partly due to its isolation from life, as if God could be segregated.

God is either of no importance, or of supreme importance.

The most incomprehensible fact is that we comprehend at all.

Faced with the mind-surpassing grandeur of the universe, we cannot but admit that there is meaning which is greater than man.

Awe rather than faith is the cardinal attitude of the religious Jew.

A world without time would be a world without God, a world existing in and by itself, without renewal, without a Creator.

Only those will apprehend religion who can probe its depth, who can combine intuition and love with the rigor of method

I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder.

Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.

The awe of God is wisdom.

Religion has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty. It survives on the level of activities rather than in the stillness of commitment.

Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.

Wise criticism always begins with self-criticism.

To be spiritual is to be amazed.

To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments.

There is no specialized art of prayer. All of life must be a training to pray. We pray the way we live.

To be is to stand for.

We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn, or scoff at the totality of being.

Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness.

Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society's hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.

All action is vicarious faith.

The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.

In prayer we shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender

Much of what the Bible demands can be comprised in one imperative: Remember!

To sing means to sense and to affirm that the spirit is real and that its glory is present.

What seems to be a stone is a drama.

Worship is a way of seeing the world in the light of God.

Life without commitment is not worth living.

It is not enough for me to ask question; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?

Man is a messenger who forgot the message.

We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.

All that is left is to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.

Who is a Jew? A person whose integrity decays when unmoved by the knowledge of wrong done to other people.

A religious man is a person ... whose greatest passion is compassion.

To abstain completely from all enjoyments may be easy. Yet to enjoy life and retain spiritual integrity - there is the challenge.

A soul can create only when alone ...

The task of life is to face sacred moments.

When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.

There is no reverence for God without reverence for man. Love of man is the way to the love of God.

The man who has not suffered - what does he know anyway?

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.