People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELMan is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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God is either of no importance, or of supreme importance.
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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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The test of love is in how one relates not to saints and scholars but to rascals.
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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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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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The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.
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The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time.
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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 serve does not mean to surrender but to share.
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The idea of dependence is an explanation, whereas self-sufficiency is an unprecedented, nonanalogous concept in terms of what we know about life within nature.
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Self-sufficiency, independence, the capacity to stand apart, to differ, to resist, and to defy-all are modes of being human.
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Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state–it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle.
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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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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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The true meaning of existence is disclosed in moments of living in the presence of God
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL