Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes on Life
Abraham Joshua Heschel was a Polish-born American Jewish philosopher, theologian, and rabbi, the descendant of a long line of Hasidic masters, professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and one of the leading religious voices of the twentieth-century American civil rights movement. This page collects quotes attributed to Abraham Joshua Heschel on the topic of life, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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“Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy.”
No Religion is an Island", p. 264 -
“The Meaning of Jewish Existence" in The Torch (1950)”
The time for the kingdom may be far off, but the task is plain: to retain our share in God in spite of peril and contempt. There is a war to wage against the vulgar, the glorification of the absurd , a war that is incessant, universal. Loyal to the presence of the ultimate in the common, we may be able to make it clear that man is more than man, that in doing the finite he may perceive the infinit -
“Man Is Not Alone : A Philosophy Of Religion (1951), Ch. 24 : The Great Yearning; The Yearning for Spiritual Living”
He who is satisfied has never truly craved, and he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor, his life for love , knowing that contentment is the shadow not the light . The great yearning that sweeps eternity is a yearning to praise, a yearning to serve. And when the waves of that yearning swell in our souls all the barriers are pushed aside: the crust of callousness, the hysteri -
“The greatest problem is not how to continue but how to exalt our existence. The call for a life beyond the grave is presumptuous, if there is no cry for eternal life prior to our descending to the grave. Eternity is not perpetual future but perpetual presence. He has planted in us the seed of eternal life. The world to come is not only a hereafter but also a here-now .”
Man Is Not Alone : A Philosophy Of Religion (1951), Ch. 26 : The Pious Man; Our Destiny is to Aid -
“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.”
Man's Quest For God : Studies In Prayer And Symbolism (1954), p. 7; Heschel would later use this analogy in several minor variations in other writings.