Top 100 Joshua Heschel Quotes
#1. We cannot make Him visible to us, but we can make ourselves visible to Him," said Abraham Joshua Heschel
Philip Yancey
#2. The great Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, "I did not ask for success, I asked for wonder."17
Rob Bell
#3. This is what the Sabbath should feel like. A pause. Not just a minor pause, but a major pause. Not just lowering the volume, but a muting. As the famous rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, the Sabbath is a sanctuary in time.
A. J. Jacobs
#4. It was in the early 1960s that my late revered teacher, Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, became the first major Jewish theologian in America to enter into dialogue with Christian theologians on a high theological level.
David Novak
#5. and pleasure? What is it that I am tasting?' The most eloquent rabbi and writer of Hasidic mysticism, Abraham Joshua Heschel, left Warsaw in 1939 to become an important
Diane Ackerman
#6. The great Jewish Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, "The Greeks learned in order to comprehend. The Hebrews learned in order to revere. The modern man learns in order to use" ('God in Search of Man' p34)
Paul F Herring
#7. We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things. - ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL
Scot McKnight
#8. We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate negroes ... The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#9. The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#10. Who is a Jew? A person whose integrity decays when unmoved by the knowledge of wrong done to other people.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#11. We may not know whether our understanding is correct, or whether our sentiments are noble, but the air of the day surrounds us like spring which spreads over the land without our aid or notice.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#15. A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#16. Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#17. Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#19. The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally, to imagine that God spoke to the prophet on a long-distance telephone. Yet most of us succumb to such fancy, forgetting that the cardinal sin in thinking about ultimate issues is literal-mindedness.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#20. In our own lives the voice of God speaks slowly, a syllable at a time. Reaching the peak of years, dispelling some of our intimate illusions and learning how to spell the meaning of life-experiences backwards, some of us discover how the scattered syllables form a single phrase.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#22. A world without time would be a world without God, a world existing in and by itself, without renewal, without a Creator.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#23. We may assume it is God we care for, but it may be our own ego we are concerned with. To examine our religious existence is, therefore, a task to be performed constantly.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#25. There are three starting points of contemplation about God; three trails that lead to Him. The first is the way of sensing the presence of God in the world, in things;9 the second is the way of sensing His presence in the Bible; the third is the way of sensing His presence in sacred deeds.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#26. All that is left is to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#27. We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#28. When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#29. We can all do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#30. Faith is an awareness of divine mutuality and companionship, a form of communion between God and man. It is not a psychical quality, something that exists in the mind only, but a force from the beyond.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#31. Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows
with the ability to say no to oneself.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#32. This is one of the goals of the Jewish way of living: to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#33. 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, to sense a ray of God's radiance in the jungles of history.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#34. The solution of mankind's most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence of it.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#35. There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#37. This is the status of the Bible in modern life: it is a sublime answer, but we do not know the question any more. Unless we recover the question, there is no hope of understanding the Bible.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#38. In any free society where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty - all are responsible.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#39. Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people. There are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#40. Morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#41. There are few ideas in the world of thought which contain so much spiritual power as the idea of the Sabbath. Aeons hence, when of many of our cherished theories only shreds will remain, that cosmic tapestry will continue to shine.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#44. Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#45. Religion has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty. It survives on the level of activities rather than in the stillness of commitment.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#47. There is no reverence for God without reverence for man. Love of man is the way to the love of God.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#49. There is no specialized art of prayer. All of life must be a training to pray. We pray the way we live.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#50. We worry a great deal about the problem of church and state. Now what about the church and God? Sometimes there seems to be a greater separation between the church and God than between the church and state.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#51. Life is not meaningful ... unle ss it is serving an end beyond itself; unless it is of value to someone else.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#53. Knowledge-like the sky- is never private property. No teacher has a right to withhold it from anyone who asks for it. Teaching is the art of sharing.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#55. Those of faith who plant sacred thoughts in the uplands of time, the secret gardeners of the Lord in mankind's desolate hopes, may slacken and tarry but rarely betray their vocation.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#57. Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#58. God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#60. Faced with the mind-surpassing grandeur of the universe, we cannot but admit that there is meaning which is greater than man.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#61. The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests. The primary purpose is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and man cannot live without a song.
Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#62. Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power ... Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#63. It is not enough for me to ask question; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#64. In the darkest night to be certain of the dawn ... to go through Hell and to continue to trust in the goodness of God-this is the challenge and the way.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#65. Proximity to the crowd, to the majority view, spells the death of creativity. For a soul can create only when alone, and some are chosen for the flowering that takes place in the dark avenues of night.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#66. Man's sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#70. Dear Lord, grant me the grace of wonder. Surprise me, amaze me, awe me in every crevice of your universe. Each day enrapture me with your marvelous things without number ... I do not ask to see the reason for it all: I ask only to share the wonder of it all.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#71. 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.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#72. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#74. For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#75. Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement ... get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#76. Acceptance is appreciation, and the high value of appreciation is such that to appreciate appreciation seems to be the fundamental prerequisite for survival. Mankind will not die for lack of information; it may perish for lack of appreciation.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#77. All events are secretly interrelated; the sweep of all we are doing reaches beyond the horizon of our comprehension.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#79. We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn, or scoff at the totality of being.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#81. There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious. Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time; to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#83. Modern man fell into the trap of believing that everything can be explained, that reality is a simple affair which has only to be organized in order to be mastered.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#84. 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. It is the beginning of wisdom to be amazed at the fact of our being free.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#86. no man is free who is not a master of himself, that the more liberties we enjoy, the more discipline we need.46 Laissez-faire,
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#88. A prophet's true greatness is his ability to hold God and man in a single thought.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#89. Being points beyond itself. Accustomed to think in terms of space, the expression "being points beyond itself" may be taken to denote a higher point in space. What is meant, however, is a higher category than being: the power of maintaining being.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#90. Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#91. The supremacy of expediency is being refuted by time and truth. Time is an essential dimension of existence defiant of man's power, and truth reigns in supreme majesty, unrivaled, inimitable, and can never be defeated.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#92. To try to distill the Bible, which is bursting with life, drama, and tension, to a series of principles would be like trying to reduce a living person to a diagram.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#93. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#94. The work on weekdays and the rest on the seventh day are correlated. The Sabbath is the inspirer, the other days the inspired.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#97. 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
#100. It is of the essence of virtue that the good is not to be done for the sake of a reward.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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