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 HESCHELThere are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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To us a single act of injustice–cheating in business, exploitation of the poor–is slight; to the prophets, a disaster.
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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;
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Ultimately there is no power to narcissistic, self-indulgent thinking. Authentic thinking originates with an encounter with the world.
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Is not self-sufficiency itself insufficient to explain self-sufficiency?
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We worship God through our questions.
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Racism is man’s gravest threat to man – the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.
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Society today is no longer in revolt against particular laws which it finds alien, unjust, and imposed, but against law as such, against the principle of law.
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feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal
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Being points beyond itself. Accustomed to think in terms of space, the expression “being points beyond itself” may be taken to denote a higher point in space.
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It is gratefulness which makes the soul great.
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The anchor of meaning resides in an abyss, deeper than the reach of despair.
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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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Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds.
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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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Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.
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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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For living is not being in itself, but living of the world, affecting, exploiting, consuming, comprehending, deriving
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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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Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.
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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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I have one talent, and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised, surprised at life, at ideas. This is to me the supreme Hasidic imperative: Don’t be old. Don’t be stale.
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This may be the vocation of man: to say “Amen” to being and to the Author of being; to live in defiance of absurdity, notwithstanding futility and defeat; to attain faith in God even in spite of God.
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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.
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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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Understanding God is not attained by calling into session all arguments for and against Him, in order to debate whether He is a reality or a figment of the mind.
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The world of things we perceive is but a veil. It’s flutter is music, its ornament science, but what it conceals is inscrutable.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL