We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate negroes. … The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELAudacious longing, burning songs, daring thoughts, an impulse overwhelming the heart, usurping the mind–these are all a drive towards serving Him who rings our hearts like a bell.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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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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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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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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It’s silence remains unbroken; no words can carry it away. Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear–filling grandeur.
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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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Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.
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When I marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.
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Knowledge-like the sky- is never private property. No teacher has a right to withhold it from anyone who asks for it. Teaching is the art of sharing.
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The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God. One cannot pray unless he has faith in his own ability to accost the infinite, merciful, eternal God.
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One of the major symptoms of the general crisis existent in our world today is our lack of sensitivity to words.
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Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness.
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The worship of reason is arrogance and betrays a lack of intelligence. The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith.
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Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.
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There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.
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Only in His presence shall we learn that the glory of humankind is not in its will to power but in its power of compassion.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL