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 HeschelWhen I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
Abraham Joshua HeschelThe degree to which one is sensitive to other people's suffering, to other (people's) humanity, is the index of one's own humanity
Abraham Joshua HeschelPeople are anxious to save up financial means for old age; they should also be anxious to prepare a spiritual means for old age.... Wisdom, maturity, tranquility do not come all of a sudden when we retire.
Abraham Joshua HeschelWe 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 HeschelAwe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine. ... to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe.
Abraham Joshua Heschel