Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes

The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God.

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.

Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.

Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness.

To pray is to dream in league with God, to envision His holy visions.

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

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.

The man who has not suffered - what does he know anyway?

The true meaning of existence is disclosed in moments of living in the presence of God

The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.

To be spiritual is to be amazed.

Faith like Job's cannot be shaken becasue it is the result of having been shaken.

The worship of reason is arrogance and betrays a lack of intelligence. The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith.

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.

When we pray, we bring G-d into the world

Normal consciousness is a state of stupor, in which the sensibility to the wholly real and responsiveness to the stimuli of the spirit are reduced. The mystics, knowing that man is involved in a hidden history of the cosmos, endeavor to awake from the drowsiness and apathy and to regain the state of wakefulness for their enchanted souls.

We do not step out of the world when we pray; we merely see the world in a different setting. The self is not the hub but the spoke of the revolving wheel. It is precisely the function of prayer to shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender.

There is a built-in sense of indebtedness in the consciousness of man, an awareness of owing gratitude, or being caled upon at certain moments to reciprocate, to answer, to live in a way which is compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living.

Religion has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty. It survives on the level of activities rather than in the stillness of commitment.

All that is left is to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.

Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.

Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you.

Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.

(People achieve) fullness of being in fellowship, in care for others.

Worship is a way of seeing the world in the light of God.

We can all do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments.

God is either of no importance, or of supreme importance.

Then comes the insight that All is God. One still realizes that the world is as it was, but it does not matter, it does not affect one's faith.

The essence of man is not what he is, but in what he is able to be.

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.

A prophet's true greatness is his ability to hold God and man in a single thought.

In the midst of our applauding the feats of civilization, the Bible flings itself like a knife slashing our complacency; remind us that God, too, has a voice in history.

There is happiness in the love of labor, there is misery in the love of gain.

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

It is gratefulness which makes the soul great.

I am commanded therefore I am.

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.

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.

Speech has power. Words do not fade. What starts out as a sound, ends in a deed.

Prayer is not a stratagem for occasional use, a refuge to resort to now and then. It is rather like an established residence for the innermost self. All things have a home: the bird has a nest, the fox has a hole, the bee has a hive. A soul without prayer is a soul without a home.

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.

The opposite of good is not evil, the opposite of good is indifference.