Jennifer Michael Hecht Quotes

#1. If you look at a testimony of love from 2,000 years ago it can still exactly speak to you, whereas medical advice from only 100 years ago is ridiculous.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#2. Your staying alive means so much more than you really know or that anyone is aware of at this moment.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#3. Though you work like mad to keep parts of you undiscovered, it is horrible to imagine that you will be completely successful. As the psychologist D.W. Winnicott wrote, It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#4. We did not make this world...and our childhood inclinations about how to succeed in it turn out to be wrong: often our courage is needed not to dramatically change reality but to accept it and persist in it.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#5. Death is no problem because when we are alive we are not dead and when we are dead we don't know it. So long as you can possibly worry about it, you've got nothing to worry about.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#6. One must devote oneself to figuring out that one must live for the good, for its own sake. It was a secular morality. Contemporaries did not know what to call a thing like that - he questioned their every faith, their every way of life - so they called it atheism.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#7. Yet one of the most important things we have to learn is how to cope with abundance and with our hunger for yet more abundance

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#8. We seem obsessed with motivation, rallying ourselves to something beyond the life available to us right now, and we treat this motivation as if it were a major part of the history of wisdom, which it is not.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#9. [Based upon the message of "nothing new under the sun" in Ecclesiastes,] If nothing ever changes, then God has no plan.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#10. Like belief, doubt takes a lot of different forms, from ancient Skepticism to modern scientific empiricism, from doubt in many gods to doubt in one God, to doubt that recreates and enlivens faith and doubt that is really disbelief.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#11. Job moans that it is wanton cruelty that suffering people, brutalized or in mourning, should have to relive their horrors in dreams. In fact, why should any of us, in seeking rest, be met with nightmares?

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#12. How was life before Pop-Tarts, Prozac and padded playgrounds? They ate strudel, took opium and played on the grass.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#13. When we feel safe, when we feel we are with someone who basically agrees with us about the symbolic universe, we let down our defenses, confident that our companion understands the symbols that are usually wall up, and will act appropriately.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#14. Lucian [of Samosata; 120-190 CE] was trying to make his audience laugh, rather than start a revolution

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#15. The history of doubt is not only a history of the denial of God; it is also a history of those who have grappled with the religious questions and found the possibility of other answers.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#16. A reasonable scale of probability-what is likely-forbids believing a whole range of imaginative possibilities, even though we do not know anything for sure.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#17. Some were taking this or that nervine cure-all, but the best nervine for a man who is not absolutely past repair, is to break away entirely from his calling or greed and camp out on the sea shore ... and patiently wait for the return of good health. James Bradley

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#18. We believe each other into being.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#19. Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#20. Socrates counts among those great minds who actually cultivated doubt in the name of truth.

Jennifer Michael Hecht