People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELThe problem to be faced is: how to combine loyalty to one’s own tradition with reverence for different traditions.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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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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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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It is not enough for me to ask question; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?
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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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God is not nice. God is not an uncle. God is an earthquake.
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It is the beginning of wisdom to be amazed at the fact of our being free.
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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 become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words…the tangent to the curve of human experience lies beyond the limits of language.
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Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time; to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year.
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Prayer begins at the edge of emptiness.
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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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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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Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme.
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It is dangerous to take human freedom for granted, to regard it as a prerogative rather than as an obligation, as an ultimate fact rather than as an ultimate goal.
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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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We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn, or scoff at the totality of being.
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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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Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.
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Trust is the core of human relationships, of gregariousness among men.
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Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society’s hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.
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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.
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Proximity to the crowd, to the majority view, spells the death of creativity. For a soul can create only when alone, and some are chosen for the flowering that takes place in the dark avenues of night.
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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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Acceptance is appreciation, and the high value of appreciation is such that to appreciate appreciation seems to be the fundamental prerequisite for survival.
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Faith like Job’s cannot be shaken becasue it is the result of having been shaken.
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Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL