Top 160 Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The essence of man is not what he is, but in what he is able to be.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

52. “The true meaning of existence is disclosed in moments of living in the presence of God.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

53. “Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

54. “Indeed, the sort of crimes and even the amount of delinquency that fill the prophets of Israel with dismay do not go beyond that which we regard as normal, as typical ingredients of social dynamics. To us a single act of injustice – cheating in business, exploitation of the poor – is slight; to the prophets, a disaster. To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence: to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

55. “The road to the sacred leads through the secular.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

56. “The problem to be faced is: how to combine loyalty to one’s own tradition with reverence for different traditions.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

57. “To become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

58. “It is of the essence of virtue that the good is not to be done for the sake of a reward.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

59. “There is happiness in the love of labor, there is misery in the love of gain.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

60. “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

61. “Man is a messenger who forgot the message.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

62. “A prophet’s true greatness is his ability to hold God and man in a single thought.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

63. “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

64. “Worship is a way of seeing the world in the light of God.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

65. “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

66. “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

67. “Every little deed counts.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

68. “Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man’s attitude toward history and nature.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

69. “To be is to stand for.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

70. “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

71. “Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

72. “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

73. “The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God. One cannot pray unless he has faith in his own ability to accost the infinite, merciful, eternal God.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

74. “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

75. “We can all do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

76. “Labor is a blessing, toil is the misery of man.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

77. “Time and space are interrelated. To overlook either of them is to be partially blind. What we plead against is man’s unconditional surrender to space, his enslavement to things. We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

78. “There is no reverence for God without reverence for man. Love of man is the way to the love of God.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

83. “We worship God through our questions.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

84. “We worry a great deal about the problem of church and state. Now what about the church and God? Sometimes there seems to be a greater separation between the church and God than between the church and state.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

85. “Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

86. “Among the many things that religious tradition holds in store for us is a legacy of wonder. 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

87. “To abstain completely from all enjoyments may be easy. Yet to enjoy life and retain spiritual integrity – there is the challenge.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

88. “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

89. “We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn, or scoff at the totality of being.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

90. “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

91. “Life without commitment is not worth living.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

92. “The worship of reason is arrogance and betrays a lack of intelligence. The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

93. “Prayer begins at the edge of emptiness.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

94. “Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

95. “Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

96. “Much of what the Bible demands can be comprised in one imperative: Remember!”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

97. “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

98. “I am commanded therefore I am.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

99. “God is either of no importance, or of supreme importance.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

100. “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.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel