We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELPrayer 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.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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Prayer begins at the edge of emptiness.
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The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests. The primary purpose is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and man cannot live without a song.
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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 not a psychical quality, something that exists in the mind only, but a force from the beyond.
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The awe of God is wisdom.
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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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This is one of the goals of the Jewish way of living: to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things.
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Self-respect is the fruit of discipline.
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God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.
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All that is left is to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.
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The degree to which one is sensitive to other people’s suffering, to other (people’s) humanity, is the index of one’s own humanity
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Is not self-sufficiency itself insufficient to explain self-sufficiency?
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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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Man has indeed become primarily a tool-making animal, and the world is now a gigantic tool box for the satisfaction of his needs.
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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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We may not know whether our understanding is correct, or whether our sentiments are noble, but the air of the day surrounds us like spring which spreads over the land without our aid or notice.
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You must build your life as if it were a work of art.
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A prophet’s true greatness is his ability to hold God and man in a single thought.
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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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It is as if He were waiting to enter our empty, perishing lives.
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All action is vicarious faith.
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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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Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society’s hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.
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We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate negroes. … The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.
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God is not nice. God is not an uncle. God is an earthquake.
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Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL