Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotations | Page 2

He who is satisfied has never truly craved, and he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor.

I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder.

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

Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you.

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

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.

Self-respect is the root of discipline

There is no answer to Auschwitz...To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God's radiance in the jungles of history.

Being is transcended by a concern for being. Our perplexity will not be solved by relating human existence to a timeless, subpersonal abstraction which we call essence. We can do justice to human being only by relating it to the transcendent care for being.

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.