Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHELTo us a single act of injustice–cheating in business, exploitation of the poor–is slight; to the prophets, a disaster.
More Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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Every little deed counts.
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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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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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The answers are questions in disguise, every new answer giving rise to new questions.
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A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time
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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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We use words as tools. We forget that words are a repository of the spirit. The tragedy of our times is that the vessels of the spirit are broken.
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The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time.
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Our age is one in which usefulness is thought to be the chief merit of nature; in which the attainment of power
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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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Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time.
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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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What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe.
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Mundus vult decipi’—the world wants to be deceived.
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God cannot be sensed as a second thought, as an explanation of the origin of the universe. He is either the first and the last, or just another concept.
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The task of life is to face sacred moments.
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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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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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Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.
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A prophet’s true greatness is his ability to hold God and man in a single thought.
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To pray is to dream in league with God, to envision His holy visions.
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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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When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
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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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The course of life is unpredictable no one can write his autobiography in advance.
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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.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL