Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELIn a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for truth and have begun striving for ourselves.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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The man who has not suffered – what does he know anyway?
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Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society.
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There are two primary ways in which mans relates himself to the world that surround him: manipulation and appreciation .
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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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Life is not meaningful…unle ss it is serving an end beyond itself; unless it is of value to someone else.
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Only those will apprehend religion who can probe its depth, who can combine intuition and love with the rigor of method
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We worry a great deal about the problem of church and state. Now what about the church and God?
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Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions. Source: The Wisdom of Heschel
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Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.
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To sense a ray of God’s radiance in the jungles of history.
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To abstain completely from all enjoyments may be easy. Yet to enjoy life and retain spiritual integrity – there is the challenge.
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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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Worship is a way of seeing the world in the light of God.
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There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious.
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When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
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Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.
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Human being is both being in the world and living in the world. Living involves responsible understanding of one’s role in relation to all other beings.
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Reality to us is thinghood , consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing.
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It is of the essence of virtue that the good is not to be done for the sake of a reward.
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We do not step out of the world when we pray; we merely see the world in a different setting.
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Morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.
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He who is satisfied has never truly craved, and he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor.
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It is the beginning of wisdom to be amazed at the fact of our being free.
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Understanding God is not attained by calling into session all arguments for and against Him, in order to debate whether He is a reality or a figment of the mind.
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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.
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Sometimes there seems to be a greater separation between the church and God than between the church and state.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL