Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes

Abraham Joshua Heschel offers thoughtful, spiritual reflections that readers seeking faith, meaning and life insight will appreciate.

27 quotes

1. 'One must forget many cliches in order to behold a single image. Insight is the beginning of perceptions to come rather than the extension of perceptions gone by. Conventional seeing, operating as it does with patterns and coherences, is a way of seeing the present in the past tense. Insight is an attempt to think in the present. ... insight is knowledge at first sight.' - The Prophets, Introduction

2. '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.'

3. '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.

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

5. 'We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.'

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

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

8. 'The focus of prayer is not the self.... It is the momentary disregard of our personal concerns, the absence of self-centered thoughts, which constitute the art of prayer.... Thus, in beseeching Him for bread, there is one instant, at least, in which our mind is directed neither to our hunger nor to food, but to His mercy. This instant is prayer. We start with a personal concern and live to feel the utmost.'

9. 'The deepest passion in any human being is the craving for meaning of human exsistence- God is the meaning beyond'

10. 'Man is a messenger who forgot the message.'

11. '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.'

12. 'The road to the sacred leads through the secular.'

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

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

15. 'The greatest problem is not how to continue but how to exalt our existence. The call for a life beyond the grave is presumptuous, if there is no cry for eternal life prior for our descending to the grave. Eternity is not perpetual future but perpetual presence. He has planted in us the seed of eternal life. The world to come is not only a hereafter but also a herenow.'

16. We worship God through our questions.

17. To serve does not mean to surrender but to share.

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

19. 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.

20. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society.

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

22. Prayer begins where our power ends.

23. The awe of God is wisdom.

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

25. 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.

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

27. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.