Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes

A soul can create only when alone.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.