Man’s true fulfillment depends on communion with that which transcends him.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELPrayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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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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To be is to stand for.
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To sing means to sense and to affirm that the spirit is real and that its glory is present.
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How embarrassing for man to be the greatest miracle on earth and not to understand it!
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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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We worship God through our questions.
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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.
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The worship of reason is arrogance and betrays a lack of intelligence. The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith.
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Each day enrapture me with your marvelous things without number. …I do not ask to see the reason for it all: I ask only to share the wonder of it all.
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We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn, or scoff at the totality of being.
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To become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words.
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It is dangerous to take human freedom for granted, to regard it as a prerogative rather than as an obligation, as an ultimate fact rather than as an ultimate goal.
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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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Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.
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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.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL