Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes

132 Sourced Quotes

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

Abraham Joshua Heschel
Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature.

Abraham Joshua Heschel
Ultimately there is no power to narcissistic, self-indulgent thinking. Authentic thinking originates with an encounter with the world.

Abraham Joshua Heschel
The world presents itself in two ways to me. The world as a thing I own, the world as a mystery I face. What I own is a trifle, what I face is sublime. I am careful not to waste what I own; I must learn not to miss what I face.
We manipulate what is available on the surface of the world; we must also stand in awe before the mystery of the world. We objectify Being but we also are present at Being in wonder, in radical amazement.
All we have is a sense of awe and radical amazement in the face of a mystery that staggers our ability to sense it.

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

Abraham Joshua Heschel
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
The patient must not be defined as a client who contracts a physician for service; he is a human being entrusted to the cure of a physician.

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

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

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

Abraham Joshua Heschel
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
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
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
As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.

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

Abraham Joshua Heschel
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
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
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.

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

Abraham Joshua Heschel
The body is a sanctuary, the doctor is a priest.

Abraham Joshua Heschel
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
Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.

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

Abraham Joshua Heschel
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.

Abraham Joshua Heschel
The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.

Abraham Joshua Heschel
There is immense silent agony in the world, and the task of man is to be a voice for the plundered poor, to prevent the desecration of the soul and the violation of our dream of honesty.
The more deeply immersed I became in the thinking of the prophets, the more powerfully it became clear to me what the lives of the Prophets sought to convey: that 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
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
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.

Abraham Joshua Heschel
What manner of man is the doctor? Life abounds in works of achievement, in areas of excellence and beauty, but the physician is a person who has chosen to go to the areas of distress, to pay attention to sickness and affliction, to injury and anguish.

Abraham Joshua Heschel