32 Quotes by Jennifer Michael Hecht

We are humanity, Kant says. Humanity needs us because we are it. Kant believes in duty and considers remaining alive a primary human duty. For him one is not permitted to “renounce his personality,” and while he states living as a duty, it also conveys a kind of freedom: we are not burdened with the obligation of judging whether our personality is worth maintaining, whether our life is worth living. Because living it is a duty, we are performing a good moral act just by persevering.

Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.

Lucian [of Samosata; 120-190 CE] was trying to make his audience laugh, rather than start a revolution

Jack Miles's wonderful literary reading of the Hebrew Bible as a biography of God offers the insight that after the Book of Job, God never speaks again. God may seem to silence Job, but Job silences God. It is lovely that Job silencing God is part of the text (though likely an accidental order of the books), because it reflects a real change in the real world after the Book of Job came into it.

HistoryEven Eve, the only soul in all of timeto never have to wait for love,must have leaned some sleepless nightsalone against the garden walland wailed, cold, stupefied, and wildand wished to trade-in all of Edento have but been a child.In fact, I gather that is why she leapt and fell from grace,that she might have a story of herself to tellin some other place.

لاحظ فيورباخ إذا كنا قد أحسسنا بالإلهي على طول الخط وتبين عدم وجود إله، فما ندعوه بالإلهي أتى منا نحن في المقام الأول.

[Based upon the message of "nothing new under the sun" in Ecclesiastes,] If nothing ever changes, then God has no plan.

We believe each other into being.

If you look at a testimony of love from 2,000 years ago it can still exactly speak to you, whereas medical advice from only 100 years ago is ridiculous.