Prayer cannot bring water to parched fields, or mend a broken bridge, or rebuild a ruined city; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELHuman 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.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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In the midst of our applauding the feats of civilization, the Bible flings itself like a knife slashing our complacency; remind us that God, too, has a voice in history.
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In the second way he sees in what surrounds him things to be acknowledged, understood, valued or admired.
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The test of love is in how one relates not to saints and scholars but to rascals.
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The anchor of meaning resides in an abyss, deeper than the reach of despair.
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The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God. One cannot pray unless he has faith in his own ability to accost the infinite, merciful, eternal God.
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Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.
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Faith like Job’s cannot be shaken becasue it is the result of having been shaken.
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Prayer begins at the edge of emptiness.
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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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We use words as tools. We forget that words are a repository of the spirit. The tragedy of our times is that the vessels of the spirit are broken.
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The self is not the hub but the spoke of the revolving wheel. It is precisely the function of prayer to shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender.
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Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.
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Only those will apprehend religion who can probe its depth, who can combine intuition and love with the rigor of method
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feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal
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Sometimes there seems to be a greater separation between the church and God than between the church and state.
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