Quotes from Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

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

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.

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

Self-respect is the fruit of discipline.

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

You must build your life as if it were a work of art.

The task of life is to face sacred moments.

Knowledge-like the sky- is never private property. No teacher has a right to withhold it from anyone who asks for it. Teaching is the art of sharing.

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?

The road to the sacred leads through the secular.

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.

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

In the darkest night to be certain of the dawn...to go through Hell and to continue to trust in the goodness of God-this is the challenge and the way.

In a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for truth and have begun striving for ourselves.

Only those will apprehend religion who can probe its depth, who can combine intuition and love with the rigor of method

Life without commitment is not worth living.

As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.

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.

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.

Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.

A religious man is a person... whose greatest passion is compassion.

Man is a messenger who forgot the message.

The essence of man is not what he is, but in what he is able to be.