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A religious man is a person... whose greatest passion is compassion.

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
Whose
Greatest
Passion
Religious
Persons
Person
Men
Compassion

More quotes by Abraham Joshua Heschel

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Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. Audacious longing, burning songs, daring thoughts, an impulse overwhelming the heart, usurping the mind--these are all a drive towards serving Him who rings our hearts like a bell. It is as if He were waiting to enter our empty, perishing lives.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Wonder, or radical amazement, is a way of going beyond what is given in thing and thought, refusing to take anything for granted, to regard anything as final. It is our honest response to the grandeur and mystery of reality our confrontation with that which transcends the given.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Understanding God is not attained by calling into session all arguments for and against Him, in order to debate whether He is a reality or a figment of the mind. God cannot be sensed as a second thought, as an explanation of the origin of the universe. He is either the first and the last, or just another concept.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Self-respect is the fruit of discipline the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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There is no specialized art of prayer. All of life must be a training to pray. We pray the way we live.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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There is no answer to Auschwitz...To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God's radiance in the jungles of history.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Prayer is not a stratagem for occasional use, a refuge to resort to now and then. It is rather like an established residence for the innermost self. All things have a home: the bird has a nest, the fox has a hole, the bee has a hive. A soul without prayer is a soul without a home.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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(People) can never attain fulfillment, or sense of meaning, unless it is shared, unless it pertains to other human beings.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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To be spiritual is to be amazed.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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...morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.
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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The course of life is unpredictable no one can write his autobiography in advance.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Life without commitment is not worth living.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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In the midst of our applauding the feats of civilization, the Bible flings itself like a knife slashing our complacency remind us that God, too, has a voice in history.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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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.
Abraham Joshua Heschel