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.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELSometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear-filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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When faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.
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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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You must build your life as if it were a work of art.
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There is no specialized art of prayer. All of life must be a training to pray. We pray the way we live.
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The awe of God is wisdom.
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I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder.
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However, we must not convert an inclination into an axiom that just as man’s perceptions cannot operate outside time and space, so his motivations cannot operate outside expediency;
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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.
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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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There is a war to wage against the vulgar, the glorification of the absurd, a war that is incessant, universal.
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In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch.
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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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Awe enables us to see in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance
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Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong.
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As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL