Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes

How do we live in a way that shows an understanding that we genuinely live in a shared world, not one that simply belongs to us?

Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.

Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein.

The world we are born into-this complicated, difficult, hauntingly touching world-is the one whole thing. It is the world we awaken in, and awaken to.

Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.

To be happy is not the purpose for which you are placed in this world.

We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own - indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process.

If we had kept the vision of interconnectedness, we would not have created the kind of environmental crisis facing the world today.

If human life is to survive on this planet, the old dualistic worldview, with people on one side and the environment on the other, must yield to a new vision that connects us with everything else and leads us to care for and take responsibility for it.

Man knows himself only insofar as he knows the world, becoming aware of it if only within himself, and of himself self only within it. Each new subject, well observed, opens up within us a new organ of thought.

Only in the last moment in history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world.

All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.

Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

I think there is a way to do things right to tread lightly on the world

True Godliness doesn't turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it, and excites their endeavors to mend it. ...We have nothing that we can call our own; no, not our selves: for we are all but Tenants, and at Will, too, of the great Lord of our selves, and the rest of this great farm, the World that we live upon.

Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.

The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn't one of them. Well, this world isn't one either.

We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.

The only thing we have to give to the world is our own grasp on it.

The appearance of the other in the world corresponds therefore to a congealed sliding of the whole universe.

We so seldom understand each other. But if understanding is neither here nor there, and the universe is infinite, then understand that no matter where we go we will always be smack dab in the middle of nowhere. All we can do is share some piece of ourselves, and hope that it’s remembered. Hope that we meant something to someone

To harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and its people.