Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes

To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.

No one thought up being. He who thinks he has, step forward.

The One, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, these are what we call the transcendental attributes of Being, because they surpass all the limits of essences and are coextensive with Being.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time.

I think, therefore I am.

Art has always been and is in its very essence the boldest departure from nature. It is the bridge into the spirit world.

The world is everything that is the case.

Is perception equivalent to existence?

I don't think anything might have been. What is, is.

Metaphysics,--the science which determines what can and what cannot be known of being and the laws of being.

The Master persistently warned against the attempt to encompass Reality in a concept or a name. A scholar in mysticism once asked, "When you speak of BEING, sir, is it eternal, transcendent being you speak of, or transient, contingent being?" The Master closed his eyes in thought. Then he opened them, put on his most disarming expression, and said, "Yes!"

I think politics should be expressed in this way and not in other ways. And not just politics - sentiments, even certain states of being.

If we are all strong, stable, we can set our sail with any wind in the world that comes along. We make up our own direction. If we are not strong, we are like a leaf in the wind and the world's winds will take us where they wish, not where we wish. So we meditate, every day, regularly, and gain transcendental being in our everyday life and then we are strong. When we are all infused with Being, we need not think which course is right, we just take the one that is automatically. Being is the wind-resister and the sail-setter.

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.

Being that can be understood is language.

Sometime I think; and sometime I am.

Oh, I think it's definitely spiritual. All music is. I think it's maybe one of the highest forms of spirituality.

The problem is we think we exist.

Being is the soul of every concept, of every judgment and of every reasoning.

thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think.

Animals are good to think with.