“To serve does not mean to surrender but to share.”

A soul can create only when alone.

Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.

The time for the kingdom may be far off, but the task is plain: to retain our share in God in spite of peril and contempt.

In any free society where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty – all are responsible.

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.

Religion has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty. It survives on the level of activities rather than in the stillness of commitment.

In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch.

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.

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.

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.

Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions. Source: The Wisdom of Heschel

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

We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate negroes. … The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.

Indeed, the sort of crimes and even the amount of delinquency that fill the prophets of Israel with dismay do not go beyond that which we regard as normal, as typical ingredients of social dynamics.

In the second way he sees in what surrounds him things to be acknowledged, understood, valued or admired.

We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.

Just because something happens to be legal does not make it moral, ethical or right.

No supernatural can exist for the mankind that does not want to believe it.

When one does not understand death, life can be very confusing.

How much does the universe weigh, when it fasts for infinity?

Whenever we feel that we are definitely right, so much so that we refuse to open up to anything or anybody else, right there we are wrong. It becomes wrong view.

Where does peace arise? Peace arises whenever we let something go.

Things are simply the way they are. They don’t give us suffering. Like a thorn: Does a sharp thorn give us suffering?

Telling what you feel, trying to talk about what’s important to you, does not make you weaker.