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.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELAs civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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To be is to stand for.
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Faith like Job’s cannot be shaken becasue it is the result of having been shaken.
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A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children.
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When religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.
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Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.
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Audacious 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.
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Man has indeed become primarily a tool-making animal, and the world is now a gigantic tool box for the satisfaction of his needs.
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Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.
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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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This is one of the goals of the Jewish way of living: to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things.
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Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted.
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Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you.
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To sense the ultimate in the common and the simple, to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.
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Is not self-sufficiency itself insufficient to explain self-sufficiency?
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By the word of God the world was created.
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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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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
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God is either of no importance, or of supreme importance.
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And yet we must not regard this revolt as entirely negative. The energy that rejects many obsolete laws is an entirely positive impulse for renewal of life and law.
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This may be the vocation of man: to say “Amen” to being and to the Author of being; to live in defiance of absurdity, notwithstanding futility and defeat; to attain faith in God even in spite of God.
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Then comes the insight that All is God. One still realizes that the world is as it was, but it does not matter, it does not affect one’s faith.
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The answers are questions in disguise, every new answer giving rise to new questions.
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It is not a psychical quality, something that exists in the mind only, but a force from the beyond.
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Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.
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Man is a messenger who forgot the message.
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In prayer we shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL