Top 160 Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

Featured in: Conscience Quotes

3. “When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

4. “Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

5. “Prayer cannot bring water to parched fields, or mend a broken bridge, or rebuild a ruined city; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

6. “Awe enables us to see in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple, to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

7. “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

8. “Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

10. “Faith like Job’s cannot be shaken becasue it is the result of having been shaken.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

11. “Racism is man’s gravest threat to man – the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

12. “In any free society where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty – all are responsible.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

14. “It is gratefulness which makes the soul great.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

16. “You must build your life as if it were a work of art.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

17. “I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

18. “Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

19. “The task of life is to face sacred moments.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

20. “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

21. “Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

22. “Self-respect is the fruit of discipline.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

23. “Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society’s hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

24. “Words create worlds.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

25. “Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

26. “The course of life is unpredictable no one can write his autobiography in advance.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

27. “The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

28. “Knowledge-like the sky- is never private property. No teacher has a right to withhold it from anyone who asks for it. Teaching is the art of sharing.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

29. “God is not nice. God is not an uncle. God is an earthquake.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

30. “Few are guilty, but all are responsible.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

31. “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

32. “Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

33. “For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

35. “The awe of God is wisdom.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

36. “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.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

37. “Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

38. “To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

39. “In a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for truth and have begun striving for ourselves.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

40. “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.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

41. “The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests. The primary purpose is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and man cannot live without a song. Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

43. “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

44. “The man who has not suffered – what does he know anyway?”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

45. “When religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

46. “Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

47. “Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion – its message becomes meaningless.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

48. “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

49. “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

50. “How embarrassing for man to be the greatest miracle on earth and not to understand it!”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel