248 Quotes by Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

There is no reverence for God without reverence for man. Love of man is the way to the love of God.

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.

Then comes the insight that All is God. One still realizes that the world is as it was, but it does not matter, it does not affect one’s faith.

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.

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.

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

Time and space are interrelated. To overlook either of them is to be partially blind. What we plead against is man’s unconditional surrender to space, his enslavement to things. We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things.

A world without time would be a world without God, a world existing in and by itself, without renewal, without a Creator.