Quotes by Abraham Joshua Heschel

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Polish-American rabbi

Lived from: 1907 - 1972

Born: 11 january 1907 Died: 23 december 1972

Quotes 1 till 20 of 35.

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  • 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
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  • The supremacy of expediency is being refuted by time and truth. Time is an essential dimension of existence defiant of man's power, and truth reigns in supreme majesty, unrivaled, inimitable, and can never be defeated.
    Source: Who Is Man? (1965)
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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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.
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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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.
    Source: Who Is Man? (1965)
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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  • Being as we know it, the world as we come upon it, stands before us as otherness, remoteness. For all our efforts to exploit or comprehend it, it remains evasive, mysteriously immune. Being is unbelievable.
    Source: Who Is Man? (1965)
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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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.
    Source: Who Is Man? (1965)
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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  • Faith is an awareness of divine mutuality and companionship, a form of communion between God and man. It is not a psychical quality, something that exists in the mind only, but a force from the beyond.
    Source: Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997) p. 331
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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  • Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but the endless, tameless pilgrimage of hearts.
    Source: Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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  • Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.
    Source: Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997) p. 339
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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  • 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
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  • God is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance.
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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  • He who is satisfied has never truly craved, and he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor.
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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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.
    Source: Who Is Man? (1965)
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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  • 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.
    Source: The Zookeepers Wife (2008)
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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  • In a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for truth and have begun striving for ourselves.
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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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?
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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  • Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.
    Source: Insecurity of Freedom
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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  • Man is a messenger who forgot the message.
    Source: The Zookeepers Wife (2008)
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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  • New insight begins when satisfaction comes to an end, when all that has been seen, said, or done looks like a distortion. Man's true fulfillment depends on communion with that which transcends him.
    Source: Who Is Man? (1965)
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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  • Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.
    ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
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