Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELWhen 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.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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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.
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Religion has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty. It survives on the level of activities rather than in the stillness of commitment.
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Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.
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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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Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness.
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The tragedy of religion is partly due to its isolation from life, as if God could be segregated.
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Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you.
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But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.
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When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
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The time for the kingdom may be far off, but the task is plain: to retain our share in God in spite of peril and contempt.
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Being is transcended by a concern for being. Our perplexity will not be solved by relating human existence to a timeless, subpersonal abstraction which we call essence.
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Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.
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Speech has power. Words do not fade. What starts out as a sound, ends in a deed.
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Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.
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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.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL