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The issue of prayer is not prayer the issue of prayer is God.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

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Abraham Joshua Heschel
Age: 65 †
Born: 1907
Born: January 11
Died: 1972
Died: December 23
Judaic Scholar
Philosopher
Rabbi
University Teacher
Warszawa
Abraham Heschel
Issue
Issues
Prayer

More quotes by Abraham Joshua Heschel

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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.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Self-sufficiency, independence, the capacity to stand apart, to differ, to resist, and to defy-all are modes of being human.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Religion has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty. It survives on the level of activities rather than in the stillness of commitment.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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There is happiness in the love of labor, there is misery in the love of gain.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Self-respect is the root of discipline
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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There are few ideas in the world of thought which contain so much spiritual power as the idea of the Sabbath. Aeons hence, when of many of our cherished theories only shreds will remain, that cosmic tapestry will continue to shine.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Philosophy may be defined as the art of asking the right question...awareness of the problem outlives all solutions. The answers are questions in disguise, every new answer giving rise to new questions.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear-filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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The problem to be faced is: how to combine loyalty to one's own tradition with reverence for different traditions.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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To serve does not mean to surrender but to share.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests. The primary purpose is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and man cannot live without a song. Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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We worry a great deal about the problem of church and state. Now what about the church and God? Sometimes there seems to be a greater separation between the church and God than between the church and state.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Much of what the Bible demands can be comprised in one imperative: Remember!
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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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.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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We do not step out of the world when we pray we merely see the world in a different setting. The self is not the hub but the spoke of the revolving wheel. It is precisely the function of prayer to shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender.
Abraham Joshua Heschel