Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELFor many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong.
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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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To pray is to dream in league with God, to envision His holy visions.
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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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Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted.
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There is no answer to Auschwitz…To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair
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Indeed, the sort of crimes and even the amount of delinquency that fill the prophets of Israel with dismay do not go beyond that which we regard as normal, as typical ingredients of social dynamics.
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The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments.
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Only in His presence shall we learn that the glory of humankind is not in its will to power but in its power of compassion.
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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.
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In a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for truth and have begun striving for ourselves.
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To sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.
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Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.
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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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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