It is not a psychical quality, something that exists in the mind only, but a force from the beyond.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELPrayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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Is not self-sufficiency itself insufficient to explain self-sufficiency?
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We must first peer into the darkness, feel strangled and entombed in the hopelessness of living without God, before we are ready to feel the presence of His living light.
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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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(People) can never attain fulfillment, or sense of meaning, unless it is shared, unless it pertains to other human beings.
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Those who are open to the wonder will not miss it. Faith is found in solicitude for faith, in an inner care for the wonder that is everywhere.
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The awe of God is wisdom.
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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.
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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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Prayer begins at the edge of emptiness.
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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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Being is transcended by a concern for being. Our perplexity will not be solved by relating human existence to a timeless, subpersonal abstraction which we call essence.
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In the darkest night to be certain of the dawn…to go through Hell and to continue to trust in the goodness of God-this is the challenge and the way.
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Prayer begins where our power ends.
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There is a built-in sense of indebtedness in the consciousness of man, an awareness of owing gratitude, or being caled upon at certain moments to reciprocate
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As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind.
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By the word of God the world was created.
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There is no answer to Auschwitz…To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair
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Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.
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Society today is no longer in revolt against particular laws which it finds alien, unjust, and imposed, but against law as such, against the principle of law.
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I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder.
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Speech has power. Words do not fade. What starts out as a sound, ends in a deed.
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Man’s sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God.
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Philosophy, to be relevant, must offer us a wisdom to live by.
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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.
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Man is a messenger who forgot the message.
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The idea of dependence is an explanation, whereas self-sufficiency is an unprecedented, nonanalogous concept in terms of what we know about life within nature.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL