Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes - Page 3

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.

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

When I marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.

There is no specialized art of prayer. All of life must be a training to pray. We pray the way we live.

Every little deed counts.

We 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.

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.

Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.

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.

Indeed, the sort of crimes and even the amount of delinquency that fill the prophets of Israel with dismay do not go beyond that which we regard as normal, as typical ingredients of social dynamics. To us a single act of injustice--cheating in business, exploitation of the poor--is slight; to the prophets, a disaster. To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence: to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world.

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

People 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.

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

Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds.

(People) can never attain fulfillment, or sense of meaning, unless it is shared, unless it pertains to other human beings.

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

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.

We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate negroes. ... The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.

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.

The problem to be faced is: how to combine loyalty to one's own tradition with reverence for different traditions.

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

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 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.

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.

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