Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELBeing 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.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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It is as if He were waiting to enter our empty, perishing lives.
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The work on weekdays and the rest on the seventh day are correlated. The Sabbath is the inspirer, the other days the inspired.
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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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When I see an act of evil I don’t accomodate, I don’t accomodate myself to the violence that goes on everywhere.
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The road to the sacred leads through the secular.
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Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man’s attitude toward history and nature.
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To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence: to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world.
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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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Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.
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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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It is of the essence of virtue that the good is not to be done for the sake of a reward.
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We do not step out of the world when we pray; we merely see the world in a different setting.
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A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time
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Proximity to the crowd, to the majority view, spells the death of creativity. For a soul can create only when alone, and some are chosen for the flowering that takes place in the dark avenues of night.
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Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL