Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Perhaps God chose me to be an atheist?

The point is to strip down, get protestant, then even more naked. Walk over scorched bricks to find your own soul. Your heart a searching dog in the rubble.

I'm really intrigued by those eternal questions of creation and belief and faith. I don't care who you are, it's what we all think about. It's in the back of all our minds.

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

I'm convinced we all have a God-shaped space in us, and until we fill that space with God, we'll never know what it is to be whole.

God has leveraged the human spirit to move in His direction, and all the material we need to bring a person to the realization that they were created by God actually already exists inside that person.

To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence, hollering, 'What's it for?'

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Man is lost and is wandering in a jungle where real values have no meaning. Real values can have meaning to man only when he steps on to the spiritual path, a path where negative emotions have no use.

And History will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died.

Souls are not designed to float around in thin air.

I found thee not, O Lord, without, because I erred in seeking thee without that wert within.

The divine is perhaps that quality in man which permits him to endure the lack of God.

You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.

A person cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human. To become human, is what this individual person, has been created for.

If you go on working with the light available, you will meet your Master, as he himself will be seeking you.

So few humans seem to fully exist themselves that I wonder if all this endless speculation and haggling about God is really an exploration of a more interesting and embarrassing question about ourselves.

God puts certain things in certain people. I'm a restless soul. I'm always searching. I'm always pressing to find what truth is and what life is all about.

I know not what you believe of God, but I believe He gave yearnings and longings to be filled, and that He did not mean all our time should be devoted to feeding and clothing the body.

We are not angels, we are merely sophisticated apes. Yet we feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, craving transcendence and all the time trying to spread our wings and fly off, and it's really a very odd predicament to be in, if you think about it.

I tell myself I write because I want to say something true and original about the nature of evil. That is very ambitious - to say something about the human condition that hasn't been written before. Probably I will never succeed but that is what I strive to do.

Man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage.

If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth.