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Quotes from Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays — Abraham Joshua Heschel

1907–1972 Poland

← All quotes by Abraham Joshua Heschel

41 quotes

Faith is something that comes out of the soul. It is not an information that is absorbed but an attitude, existing prior to the formulation of any creed.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

Those who trust develop a finer sense for the good, even at the hight cost of blighted hopes. Charmed by the spell of love, faith is, as it were, imposed upon their heart.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

One of the results of the rapid depersonalization of our age is a crisis of speech, profanation of language.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

Faith is sensitiveness to what transcends nature, knowledge and will, awareness of the ultimate, alertness to the holy dimension of all reality.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

There are neither skies nor oceans, neither birds nor trees — there are only signs of what can never be perceived.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

A shift of conceptions, boisterous like a tempest of soft as a breeze may swerve a mind for an instant or forever. For God is not wholly silent and man is not always deaf.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

The proper relation is a minimum of creed and a maximum of faith.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

There is neither advance nor service without faith.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

Religion is critique of all satisfaction.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but the endless, tameless pilgrimage of hearts.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

Faith is not a thing that comes into being out of nothing. It originates in an event.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

All scientific conclusions are based on axioms, all reasoning depends ultimately upon faith.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

It seems as though we have arrived at a point in history, closest to the instincts and remotest from ideals, where the self stands like a wall between God and man.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

The riches of the soul are stored up in its memory. this is the test of character, not whether a man follows the daily fashion, but whether the past is alive in his present.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

The ultimate is a challenge, not an assertion. Dogmas are allusions, not descriptions.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

Language has been reduced to labels, talk has become double-talk. We are in the process of losing faith in the reality of words.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

There are many creeds but only one faith. Creeds may change, develop, and grow flat, while the substance of faith remains the same in all ages.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God. One cannot pray unless he has faith in his own ability to accost the infinite, merciful, eternal God.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Abraham Joshua Heschel (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.