Human being is both being in the world and living in the world. Living involves responsible understanding of one’s role in relation to all other beings.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELThere is a built-in sense of indebtedness in the consciousness of man, an awareness of owing gratitude, or being caled upon at certain moments to reciprocate
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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This may be the vocation of man: to say “Amen” to being and to the Author of being; to live in defiance of absurdity, notwithstanding futility and defeat; to attain faith in God even in spite of God.
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Wisdom, maturity, tranquility do not come all of a sudden when we retire.
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The course of life is unpredictable no one can write his autobiography in advance.
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When faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.
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Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.
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Reality to us is thinghood , consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing.
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The problem to be faced is: how to combine loyalty to one’s own tradition with reverence for different traditions.
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Normal consciousness is a state of stupor, in which the sensibility to the wholly real and responsiveness to the stimuli of the spirit are reduced.
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Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society’s hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.
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Loyal to the presence of the ultimate in the common, we may be able to make it clear that man is more than man, that in doing the finite he may perceive the infinite .
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Audacious longing, burning songs, daring thoughts, an impulse overwhelming the heart, usurping the mind–these are all a drive towards serving Him who rings our hearts like a bell.
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God cannot be sensed as a second thought, as an explanation of the origin of the universe. He is either the first and the last, or just another concept.
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It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.
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Proximity to the crowd, to the majority view, spells the death of creativity. For a soul can create only when alone, and some are chosen for the flowering that takes place in the dark avenues of night.
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When I marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL