Top 160 Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

102. “We must first peer into the darkness, feel strangled and entombed in the hopelessness of living without God, before we are ready to feel the presence of His living light.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

103. “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

104. “Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

105. “There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious. Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time; to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

106. “Time... which is eternity in disguise.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

107. “There is a built-in sense of indebtedness in the consciousness of man, an awareness of owing gratitude, or being caled upon at certain moments to reciprocate, to answer, to live in a way which is compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

108. “The solution of mankind’s most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence of it.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

109. “The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

110. “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.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

111. “The test of love is in how one relates not to saints and scholars but to rascals.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

112. “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.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

113. “Proximity to the crowd, to the majority view, spells the death of creativity. For a soul can create only when alone, and some are chosen for the flowering that takes place in the dark avenues of night.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

115. “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.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

116. “All action is vicarious faith.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

117. “In the midst of our applauding the feats of civilization, the Bible flings itself like a knife slashing our complacency; remind us that God, too, has a voice in history.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

118. “A world without time would be a world without God, a world existing in and by itself, without renewal, without a Creator.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

119. “God does not reveal Himself; he only reveals His way. Judaism does not speak of God’s self-revelation, but of the revelation of His teaching for man. The Bible reflects God’s revelation of His relation to history, rather than of a revelation of His very Self. Even His will or His wisdom is not completely expressed through the prophets. Prophecy is superior to human wisdom, and God’s love is superior to prophecy. This spiritual hierarchy is explicitly stated by the Rabbis.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

120. “To pray is to dream in league with God, to envision His holy visions.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

121. “In our own lives the voice of God speaks slowly, a syllable at a time. Reaching the peak of years, dispelling some of our intimate illusions and learning how to spell the meaning of life-experiences backwards, some of us discover how the scattered syllables form a single phrase.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

122. “Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear-filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

123. “What seems to be a stone is a drama.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

124. “Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

125. “In prayer we shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

126. “There are few ideas in the world of thought which contain so much spiritual power as the idea of the Sabbath. Aeons hence, when of many of our cherished theories only shreds will remain, that cosmic tapestry will continue to shine.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

127. “The tragedy of religion is partly due to its isolation from life, as if God could be segregated.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

128. “The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

129. “The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally, to imagine that God spoke to the prophet on a long-distance telephone. Yet most of us succumb to such fancy, forgetting that the cardinal sin in thinking about ultimate issues is literal-mindedness.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

130. “To serve does not mean to surrender but to share.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

131. “As long as man sees religion as a source of satisfaction for his own needs, it is not God whom he serves but his own self.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

132. “Zion is in ruins, Jerusalem lies in the dust. All week there is only hope of redemption. But when the Sabbath is entering the world, man is touched by a moment of actual redemption; as if for a moment the spirit of the Messiah moved over the face of the earth.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

133. “With information we are alone; in appreciation we are with all things.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

134. “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

135. “Wise criticism always begins with self-criticism.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

136. “Self-sufficiency, independence, the capacity to stand apart, to differ, to resist, and to defy-all are modes of being human.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

137. “The Sabbath is the day on which we learn the art of surpassing civilization.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

138. “When we pray, we bring G-d into the world.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

139. “Happy is he who is aware of the mysteries of his Lord.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

140. “The riches of the soul are stored up in its memory. this is the test of character, not whether a man follows the daily fashion, but whether the past is alive in his present.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

141. “Only that which is good for all men is good for every man. No one is truly inspired for his own sake. He who is blessed, is a blessing for others.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

142. “All that is left is to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

143. “To sing means to sense and to affirm that the spirit is real and that its glory is present.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

144. “We may not know whether our understanding is correct, or whether our sentiments are noble, but the air of the day surrounds us like spring which spreads over the land without our aid or notice.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

145. “Just as we are commanded to keep the Sabbath, we are commanded to labor.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

146. “Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people. There are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

147. “Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

148. “A soul can create only when alone...”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

149. “The most incomprehensible fact is that we comprehend at all.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

150. “The idea of dependence is an explanation, whereas self-sufficiency is an unprecedented, nonanalogous concept in terms of what we know about life within nature. Is not self-sufficiency itself insufficient to explain self-sufficiency?”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel