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.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELJust to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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Is not self-sufficiency itself insufficient to explain self-sufficiency?
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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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Yet the abyss is not not infinite; its bottom may suddenly be discovered within the confines of a human heart or under the debris of might doubts.
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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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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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Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.
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That man can never transcend his own self. The most fatal trap into which thinking may fall is the equation of existence and expediency.
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Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.
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There is happiness in the love of labor, there is misery in the love of gain.
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We can all do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments.
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We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.
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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 can do justice to human being only by relating it to the transcendent care for being.
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The road to the sacred leads through the secular.
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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.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL