Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotations

Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.

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

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?

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.

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

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.

Man is a messenger who forgot the message.

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.

Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.

God is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance.

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.

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.

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

He who is satisfied has never truly craved, and he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor.

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.

The road to the sacred leads through the secular.

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.

Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions.

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.

A soul can create only when alone...

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.

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.

The time for the kingdom may be far off, but the task is plain: to retain our share in God in spite of peril and contempt. There is a war to wage against the vulgar, the glorification of the absurd, a war that is incessant, universal. Loyal to the presence of the ultimate in the common, we may be able to make it clear that man is more than man, that in doing the finite he may perceive the infinite .

feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal

Understanding God is not attained by calling into session all arguments for and against Him, in order to debate whether He is a reality or a figment of the mind. God cannot be sensed as a second thought, as an explanation of the origin of the universe. He is either the first and the last, or just another concept.

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

I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder.

We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn, or scoff at the totality of being.

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

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

New insight begins when satisfaction comes to an end, when all that has been seen, said, or done looks like a distortion. ... Man's true fulfillment depends on communion with that which transcends him.

Self-respect is the root of discipline

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.

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.

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.

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.

Philosophy may be defined as the art of asking the right question...awareness of the problem outlives all solutions. The answers are questions in disguise, every new answer giving rise to new questions.

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.

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.

All events are secretly interrelated; the sweep of all we are doing reaches beyond the horizon of our comprehension.

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

Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds.

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.

Human being is both being in the world and living in the world. Living involves responsible understanding of one's role in relation to all other beings. For living is not being in itself, but living of the world, affecting, exploiting, consuming, comprehending, deriving, depriving.

The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God. One cannot pray unless he has faith in his own ability to accost the infinite, merciful, eternal God.

Much of what the Bible demands can be comprised in one imperative: Remember!

Faith is something that comes out of the soul. It is not an information that is absorbed but an attitude, existing prior to the formulation of any creed.

Life without commitment is not worth living.

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.

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

I am commanded therefore I am.

The work on weekdays and the rest on the seventh day are correlated. The Sabbath is the inspirer, the other days the inspired.

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.

To be is to stand for.

How embarrassing for man to be the greatest miracle on earth and not to understand it!

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

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.

Philosophy, to be relevant, must offer us a wisdom to live by.

It is of the essence of virtue that the good is not to be done for the sake of a reward.

Self-sufficiency, independence, the capacity to stand apart, to differ, to resist, and to defy-all are modes of being human.

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.

Only those will apprehend religion who can probe its depth, who can combine intuition and love with the rigor of method

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.

Instead of indulging in jealousy, greed, in relishing themselves, there are men who keep their hearts alert to the stillness in which time rolls on and leaves us behind. ... those who are open to the wonder will not miss it. Faith is found in solicitude for faith, in an inner care for the wonder that is everywhere.

Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.

Trust is the core of human relationships, of gregariousness among men. Friendship, a puzzle to the syllogistic and critical mentality, is not based on experiments or tests of another person's qualities but on trust. It is not critical knowledge but a risk of the heart which initiates affection and preserves loyalty in our fellow men.

You must build your life as if it were a work of art.

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

Our age is one in which usefulness is thought to be the chief merit of nature; in which the attainment of power, the utilization of its resources is taken to be the chief purpose of man in God's creation. Man has indeed become primarily a tool-making animal, and the world is now a gigantic tool box for the satisfaction of his needs.

Prayer begins where our power ends.

To become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words.

Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness.

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.

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

Wise criticism always begins with self-criticism.

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

Life is not meaningful...unle ss it is serving an end beyond itself; unless it is of value to someone else.

To sing means to sense and to affirm that the spirit is real and that its glory is present.

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.

Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.

In prayer we shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender

The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.

to become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words...the tangent to the curve of human experience lies beyond the limits of language. the world of things we perceive is but a veil. It’s flutter is music, its ornament science, but what it conceals is inscrutable. It’s silence remains unbroken; no words can carry it away. Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear--filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.

The task of life is to face sacred moments.

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

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

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.

The course of life is unpredictable no one can write his autobiography in advance.

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?

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

Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.

The anchor of meaning resides in an abyss, deeper than the reach of despair. Yet the abyss is not not infinite; its bottom may suddenly be discovered within the confines of a human heart or under the debris of might doubts. This may be the vocation of man: to say "Amen" to being and to the Author of being; to live in defiance of absurdity, notwithstanding futility and defeat; to attain faith in God even in spite of God.

Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear-filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.

We worship God through our questions.

To be spiritual is to be amazed.

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.

Prayer begins at the edge of emptiness.

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.

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.

Self-respect is the fruit of discipline.