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Quotes by Abraham Joshua Heschel

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
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
Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotlely, for something supreme.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
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
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
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
Man is a messenger who forgot the message.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
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
Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
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.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
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 deacending 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.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
The road to the sacred leads through the secular.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
Worship is a way of seeing the world in the light of God.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel