Abraham Joshua Heschel quotes - page 2

The idea of dependence is an explanation, whereas self-sufficiency is an unprecedented, nonanalogous concept in terms of what we know about life within nature. Is not self-sufficiency itself insufficient to explain self-sufficiency? (Abraham Joshua Heschel)
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. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Society today is no longer in revolt against particular laws which it finds alien, unjust, and imposed, but against law as such, against the principle of law. And yet we must not regard this revolt as entirely negative. The energy that rejects many obsolete laws is an entirely positive impulse for renewal of life and law. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Being is transcended by a concern for being. Our perplexity will not be solved by relating human existence to a timeless, subpersonal abstraction which we call essence. We can do justice to human being only by relating it to the transcendent care for being. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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. Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing. The result of our thinginess is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing, as a matter of fact. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture. (Abraham Joshua Heschel)
The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Few are guilty, but all are responsible. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
The road to the sacred leads through the secular. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
There are two primary ways in which mans relates himself to the world that surround him: manipulation and appreciation . In the first way he sees in what surrounds him things to be handled, forces to be managed, objects to be put to use. In the second way he sees in what surrounds him things to be acknowledged, understood, valued or admired. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Wonder, or radical amazement, is a way of going beyond what is given in thing and thought, refusing to take anything for granted, to regard anything as final. It is our honest response to the grandeur and mystery of reality our confrontation with that which transcends the given. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
The problem to be faced is: how to combine loyalty to one's own tradition with reverence for different traditions. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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. (Abraham Joshua Heschel)
Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong. However, we must not convert an inclination into an axiom that just as man's perceptions cannot operate outside time and space, so his motivations cannot operate outside expediency; that man can never transcend his own self. The most fatal trap into which thinking may fall is the equation of existence and expediency. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
I have one talent, and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised, surprised at life, at ideas. This is to me the supreme Hasidic imperative: Don't be old. Don't be stale. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Prayer begins at the edge of emptiness. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel