Quotes from Abraham Joshua Heschel

It is the Bible that enables us to know the Bible.

The prophetic word creates, shapes, changes, builds, and destroys (see Jeremiah 1:10).

Philosophy of religion conducted in this manner, then, celebrates humility before the divine, since the awareness of God's overwhelming priority decenters us and puts us in our proper place.

The soul is frail, but God is full of compassion for the distress of the soul, for the failure of the heart. It is said in the Talmud: "There are some who desire [to help others] but have not the means; whilst others have the means [and help] but have not the desire [to help]." Yet both kinds of people are holy in the eyes of God.4

The role of religion is to be a challenge to philosophy, not merely an object for examination.

The way to understand the meaning of torah min hashamayim ("the Bible is from heaven") is to understand the meaning of hashamayim min hatorah ("heaven is from the Bible). Whatever taste of "heaven" we have on earth is in the Bible.

one should always do the good, even though it is not done for its own sake.

to the Bible the idea of the good is penultimate; it cannot exist without the holy. The holy is the essence, the good is its expression.

Rabbi Tarfon said: "You are not called upon to complete the task, yet you are not free to evade it." Whatever we do is only a partial fulfillment; the rest is completed by God.

The essence of our faith in the sanctity of the Bible is that its words contain that which God wants us to know and to fulfill. How these words were written down is not the fundamental problem.

We must constantly remember: we spoil and God restores. How ugly is the way in which we spoil, and how good and how beautiful is the way in which He restores.

The act of revelation is a mystery, while the record of revelation is a literary fact, phrased in the language of man.

These are the three pillars on which our prayer rises to God: our own loyalty, the holiness of Israel, the mercy of God.

In its present form the Bible is the only object in the world which is not in need of either praise or sanctification. In its present form the Bible is the only point in the world from which God will never depart. This is the book to which Israel deferred; we must tremble to tamper with it.

Freedom does not mean the right to live as we please. It means the power to live spiritually, to rise to a higher level of existence.

Religion becomes sinful when it begins to advocate the segregation of God, to forget that the true sanctuary has no walls. Religion has always suffered from the tendency to become an end in itself, to seclude the holy, to become parochial, self-indulgent, self-seeking; as if the task were not to ennoble human nature but to enhance the power and beauty of its institutions or to enlarge the body of doctrines.

It is not in space but in time, he writes, that we find God's likeness. In the Bible, no thing or place is holy by itself; not even the Promised Land is called holy.

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.

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

Life is not meaningful...unle ss it is serving an end beyond itself; unless it is of value to someone else.

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

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

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

We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate negroes. ... The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.