248 Quotes by Abraham Joshua Heschel

Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions.

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

Society today is no longer in revolt against particular laws which it finds alien, unjust, and imposed, but against law as such, against the principle of law. And yet we must not regard this revolt as entirely negative. The energy that rejects many obsolete laws is an entirely positive impulse for renewal of life and law.

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.

A soul can create only when alone...

To serve does not mean to surrender but to share.

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.

We can all do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments.

Faith is an awareness of divine mutuality and companionship, a form of communion between God and man. It is not a psychical quality, something that exists in the mind only, but a force from the beyond.