Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes

I remind everybody that the Sabbath was the Jewish gift to civilization.

I don't work on my Sabbath. I write five-and-a-half or six days a week.

I don't work Sunday any more... The Sabbath is a very reasonable idea. Otherwise, you work yourself to death.

I want to tell people how to live spiritually. After you've bought all your houses and your clothes, you want something bigger.

Sabbath - a weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.

I loved science, and when I discovered Buddhist meditative practices and martial arts, I was able to bridge those ways of knowing the world into my own unique way. From that grew the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, which became my karmic assignment.

My joy in my life comes from my strength in my life and in my experience with God. That cannot be separated from football. It is all the same to me. It is one. I am one with it.

I don't do anything political on Sundays.

It is not enough for each individual to have one day of rest each week. Everyone should have the same day. My ability to go shopping on Shabbat is the inability of someone else to rest on the same day.

we admonish that men keep Sunday's festival with all their might, and observe it from Saturday's noon to Monday's dawning; and no man be so bold that he either go to market or seek any court on that holy day

In mediaeval times, the Sunday was a day of recreation, of fairs, Morris-dances, mystery plays, &c., and not of enforced idleness and gloom. The Puritan movement which originated at the end of the sixteenth century … till the rebellion which cost Charles I his head, embodied in its programme a strong antagonism to the old English Sunday, an antagonism which was accentuated, by the action of the opposite party who took an equally emphatic stand upon the Sunday of tradition …. a “day of rest” was ratified by a Puritan Parliament in the well-known Act of Charles II. Thenceforward the English Sunday became the dreary day it is now.

E'en Sunday shines no Sabbath day to me.

We do not live so that we can eat, nor do we just eat so that we can live. Life is worth living in and of itself. Life cannot be satisfied when it is lived out as a consuming entity. When it is filled by that which satisfies a hunger that is both physical and spiritual in a mutuality that sustains both without violation of either, only then can life be truly fulfilling.

I feel as if God had, by giving the Sabbath, given fifty-two springs in every year.

The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.

The Christians gave Him Sunday, the Jews gave Him Saturday, and the Muslims gave Him Friday. God has a three-day weekend.

The work on weekdays and the rest on the seventh day are correlated. The Sabbath is the inspirer, the other days the inspired.

My purpose in life is to do right and to glorify God.

O what a blessing is Sunday, interposed between the waves of worldly business like the divine path of the Israelites through the sea! There is nothing in which I would advise you to be more strictly conscientious than in keeping the Sabbath day holy. I can truly declare that to me the Sabbath has been invaluable.

And now, what does it all matter? It matters more than anything else in the world. The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made.

But the meaning of life is not . . . explained by one's business life, nor is the deep desire of the human heart answered by a bank account.

The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it.

Unless we perform divine service with every willing act of our life, we never perform it at all.

I believe what Irenaeus said - the glory of God is a human being fully alive.