Quotes from Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

Prayer cannot bring water to parched fields, or mend a broken bridge, or rebuild a ruined city; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.

When I marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.

There is no specialized art of prayer. All of life must be a training to pray. We pray the way we live.

Prayer begins at the edge of emptiness.

Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.

The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God. One cannot pray unless he has faith in his own ability to accost the infinite, merciful, eternal God.

The worship of reason is arrogance and betrays a lack of intelligence. The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith.

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.

All events are secretly interrelated; the sweep of all we are doing reaches beyond the horizon of our comprehension.

When religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.

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

Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.

In any free society where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty - all are responsible.

Mundus vult decipi'—the world wants to be deceived. To live without deception presupposes standards beyond the reach of most people whose existence is largely shaped by compromise, evasion and mutual accommodation. Could they face their weakness, their vanity and selfishness, without a mask?

This is one of the goals of the Jewish way of living: to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things.

The meaning of awe is to realize that life takes place under wide horizons, horizons that range beyond the span of an individual life or even the life of a nation, a generation, or an era. Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.

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

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.

Gallantly, ceaselessly, quietly, man must fight for inner liberty" to remain independent of the enslavement of the material world. "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. This is our constant problem—how to live with people and remain free, how to live with things and remain independent.

Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.

Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature.

Indeed, the sort of crimes and even the amount of delinquency that fill the prophets of Israel with dismay do not go beyond that which we regard as normal, as typical ingredients of social dynamics. To us a single act of injustice--cheating in business, exploitation of the poor--is slight; to the prophets, a disaster. To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence: to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world.

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.