Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes

Prayer begins at the edge of emptiness.

Dear Lord, grant me the grace of wonder. Surprise me, amaze me, awe me in every crevice of your universe.

Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society’s hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.

The tragedy of religion is partly due to its isolation from life, as if God could be segregated.

We can do justice to human being only by relating it to the transcendent care for being.

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.

We cannot approach the spirit unless we repair the vessels. Reverence for words – an awareness of the wonder of words, of the mystery of words – is an essential prerequisite for prayer.

Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time.

Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.

The riches of the soul are stored up in its memory. this is the test of character, not whether a man follows the daily fashion, but whether the past is alive in his present.