Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes & Sayings

A world without time would be a world without God, a world existing in and by itself, without renewal, without a Creator. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

The awe of God is wisdom. — 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

Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows
with the ability to say no to oneself. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Dear Lord, grant me the grace of wonder. Surprise me, amaze me, awe me in every crevice of your universe. Each day enrapture me with your marvelous things without number ... I do not ask to see the reason for it all: I ask only to share the wonder of it all. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

To abstain completely from all enjoyments may be easy. Yet to enjoy life and retain spiritual integrity - there is the challenge. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

The prophets never taught that God and history are one, or that whatever happens below reflects the will of God above. Their vision is of man defying God, and God seeking man to reconcile with Him. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Man is a messenger who forgot the message. — 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

Few are guilty, but all are responsible. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Animal in man is the drive to concentrate on the satisfaction of needs; spiritual in man is the will to serve higher ends, and in serving ends he transcends his needs. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

There is a passion and drive for cruel deeds which only the awe and fear of God can soothe; there is a suffocating selfishness in man which only holiness can ventilate. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

The most incomprehensible fact is that we comprehend at all. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

With information we are alone; in appreciation we are with all things. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

In any free society where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty - all are responsible. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

God is either of no importance, or of supreme importance. — 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. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

As it was in the age of the prophets, so it is in nearly every age: we all go mad, not only individually, but also nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; we wage wars and slaughter whole peoples. Ferocity appears natural; generosity, superimposed. Since the natural often seems sacred, we seldom dare suppress or try to remake what has been called "all that fine belligerence within us." We measure manhood by the sword and are convinced that history is ultimately determined on the fields of battle. "There is no peace, says my God, for the wicked" (Isa. 57:21; cf. 48:22). — 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. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

The course of life is unpredictable no one can write his autobiography in advance. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

It is useless endeavor to fight the ego in the open; like a wounded hydra, it produces two heads for every one cut off. We must not indulge in self-scrutinization; we must not concentrate upon the problem of egocentricity. The way to purify the self is to avoid dwelling upon the self and to concentrate upon the task. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine ... to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Much of what the Bible demands can be comprised in one imperative: Remember! — Abraham Joshua Heschel

When we pray, we bring G-d into the world — Abraham Joshua Heschel

We worship God through our questions. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Zion is in ruins, Jerusalem lies in the dust. All week there is only hope of redemption. But when the Sabbath is entering the world, man is touched by a moment of actual redemption; as if for a moment the spirit of the Messiah moved over the face of the earth. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

To us, recollection is a holy act; we sanctify the present by remembering the past. To us Jews, the essence of faith is memory. To believe is to remember. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

God does not reveal Himself; he only reveals His way. Judaism does not speak of God's self-revelation, but of the revelation of His teaching for man. The Bible reflects God's revelation of His relation to history, rather than of a revelation of His very Self. Even His will or His wisdom is not completely expressed through the prophets. Prophecy is superior to human wisdom, and God's love is superior to prophecy. This spiritual hierarchy is explicitly stated by the Rabbis. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

The test of love is in how one relates not to saints and scholars but to rascals. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

To be spiritual is to be amazed. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern. — 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

Who is a Jew? A person whose integrity decays when unmoved by the knowledge of wrong done to other people. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

We may assume it is God we care for, but it may be our own ego we are concerned with. To examine our religious existence is, therefore, a task to be performed constantly. — 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

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. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

(People achieve) fullness of being in fellowship, in care for others. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people. There are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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. — 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. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

The prophet knew that religion could distort what the Lord demanded of man, that priests themselves had committed perjury by bearing false witness, condoning violence, tolerating hatred, calling for ceremonies instead of bursting forth with wrath and indignation at cruelty, deceit, idolatry, and violence.

To the people, religion was Temple, priesthood, incense: "This is the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord" (Jer. 7:4). Such piety Jeremiah brands as fraud and illusion. "Behold you trust in deceptive words to no avail," he calls (Jer. 7 : 8 ). Worship preceded o r followed by evil acts becomes a n absurdity. The holy place is doomed when people indulge in unholy deeds. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Prayer begins where our power ends. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

To try to distill the Bible, which is bursting with life, drama, and tension, to a series of principles would be like trying to reduce a living person to a diagram. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

In the darkest night to be certain of the dawn ... to go through Hell and to continue to trust in the goodness of God-this is the challenge and the way. — 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

no man is free who is not a master of himself, that the more liberties we enjoy, the more discipline we need.46 Laissez-faire, — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

Gallantly, ceaselessly, quietly, man must fight for inner liberty" to remain independent of the enslavement of the material world. "Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people. There are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things. This is our constant problem - how to live with people and remain free, how to live with things and remain independent. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Faced with the mind-surpassing grandeur of the universe, we cannot but admit that there is meaning which is greater than man. — 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. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

What seems to be a stone is a drama. — 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

Self-respect is the fruit of discipline. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Technical civilization is man's conquest of space. It is a triumph frequently achieved by sacrificing an essential ingredient of existence, namely, time. In technical civilization, we expend time to gain space. To enhance our power in the world of space is our main objective. Yet to have more does not mean to be more. The power we attain in the world of space terminates abruptly at the borderline of time. But time is the heart of existence. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Modern man fell into the trap of believing that everything can be explained, that reality is a simple affair which has only to be organized in order to be mastered. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

This is the status of the Bible in modern life: it is a sublime answer, but we do not know the question any more. Unless we recover the question, there is no hope of understanding the Bible. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

In our own lives the voice of God speaks slowly, a syllable at a time. Reaching the peak of years, dispelling some of our intimate illusions and learning how to spell the meaning of life-experiences backwards, some of us discover how the scattered syllables form a single phrase. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

God is everywhere or nowhere, the father of all people or of none, concerned about everything or nothing. Only in His presence shall we learn that the glory of humankind is not in its will to power but in its power of compassion. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

These three ways correspond in our tradition to the main aspects of religious existence: worship, learning, and action. The three are one, and we must go all three ways to reach the one destination. For this is what Israel discovered: the God of nature is the God of history, and the way to know Him is to do His will. To — Abraham Joshua Heschel

When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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 . — 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. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

There are dead thoughts and there are living thoughts. A dead thought has been compared to a stone which one may plant in the soil. Nothing will come out. A living thought is like a seed. In the process of thinking, an answer without a question is devoid of life. It may enter the mind; it will not penetrate the soul. It may become a part of one's knowledge; it will not come forth as a creative force. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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. — 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. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

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. — 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. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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. — 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

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. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Replete is the world with a spiritual radiance, replete with sublime and marvelous secrets. But a small hand held against the eye hides it all," said the Baal Shem. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Life without commitment is not worth living. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted ... Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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. — 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

To be or not to be is not the question, the vital question is how to be and how not to be ... — Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

A soul can create only when alone ... — Abraham Joshua Heschel

The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God. — Abraham Joshua Heschel