Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELThe work on weekdays and the rest on the seventh day are correlated. The Sabbath is the inspirer, the other days the inspired.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
-
-
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
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power…Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
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.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
The problem to be faced is: how to combine loyalty to one’s own tradition with reverence for different traditions.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time; to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
Much of what the Bible demands can be comprised in one imperative: Remember!
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
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.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
We must first peer into the darkness, feel strangled and entombed in the hopelessness of living without God, before we are ready to feel the presence of His living light.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
We cannot approach the spirit unless we repair the vessels. Reverence for words – an awareness of the wonder of words, of the mystery of words – is an essential prerequisite for prayer.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
Faith is an awareness of divine mutuality and companionship, a form of communion between God and man.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
However, we must not convert an inclination into an axiom that just as man’s perceptions cannot operate outside time and space, so his motivations cannot operate outside expediency;
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
Faith is something that comes out of the soul. It is not an information that is absorbed but an attitude, existing prior to the formulation of any creed.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
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.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL