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
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELSelf-respect is the fruit of discipline.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
-
-
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.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
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.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
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.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
To abstain completely from all enjoyments may be easy. Yet to enjoy life and retain spiritual integrity – there is the challenge.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
We can do justice to human being only by relating it to the transcendent care for being.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
Loyal to the presence of the ultimate in the common, we may be able to make it clear that man is more than man, that in doing the finite he may perceive the infinite .
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
Normal consciousness is a state of stupor, in which the sensibility to the wholly real and responsiveness to the stimuli of the spirit are reduced.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
All that is left is to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
Instead of indulging in jealousy, greed, in relishing themselves, there are men who keep their hearts alert to the stillness in which time rolls on and leaves us behind.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
Awe enables us to see in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
Self-sufficiency, independence, the capacity to stand apart, to differ, to resist, and to defy-all are modes of being human.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL -
The mystics, knowing that man is involved in a hidden history of the cosmos, endeavor to awake from the drowsiness and apathy and to regain the state of wakefulness for their enchanted souls.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL