Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes
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Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but the endless, tameless pilgrimage of hearts.
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The road to the sacred leads through the secular.
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Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.
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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.
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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.
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To be human is a problem, and the problem expresses itself in anguish.
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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.
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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.
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Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.
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Only straight discovering in the nearest stone or tree, sound or thought, the shelter of His often desecrated goodness, the treasury of His waiting form man's heart to affiliate with His will - this is the rapture of faith. It is an echo to a pleading voice, a reply to the inconceivable in all beauty.
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When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
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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.
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Much of what the Bible demands can be comprised in one imperative: Remember!
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Ultimately there is no power to narcissistic, self-indulgent thinking. Authentic thinking originates with an encounter with the world.
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Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.
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Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.
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Being is both presence and absence. God had to conceal His presence in order to bring the world into being. He had to make His absence possible in order to make room for the world's presence. Coming into being brought along denial and defiance, absence, oblivion and resistance.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God.
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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.
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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.