People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state--it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle.... Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions. Source: The Wisdom of Heschel
The test of love is in how one relates not to saints and scholars but to rascals.
A religious man is a person... whose greatest passion is compassion.
We worry a great deal about the problem of church and state. Now what about the church and God? Sometimes there seems to be a greater separation between the church and God than between the church and state.
In a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for truth and have begun striving for ourselves.
Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.
God is not nice. God is not an uncle. God is an earthquake.
Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.
There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.
We can all do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments.
There are two primary ways in which mans relates himself to the world that surround him: manipulation and appreciation . In the first way he sees in what surrounds him things to be handled, forces to be managed, objects to be put to use. In the second way he sees in what surrounds him things to be acknowledged, understood, valued or admired.
The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests. The primary purpose is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and man cannot live without a song. Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.
Few are guilty, but all are responsible.
Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.
How embarrassing for man to be the greatest miracle on earth and not to understand it!
The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.
To serve does not mean to surrender but to share.
Mundus vult decipi'—the world wants to be deceived. To live without deception presupposes standards beyond the reach of most people whose existence is largely shaped by compromise, evasion and mutual accommodation. Could they face their weakness, their vanity and selfishness, without a mask?
The road to the sacred leads through the secular.
The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.
When I marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.
Every little deed counts.
Wonder, or radical amazement, is a way of going beyond what is given in thing and thought, refusing to take anything for granted, to regard anything as final. It is our honest response to the grandeur and mystery of reality our confrontation with that which transcends the given.
As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.
We must first peer into the darkness, feel strangled and entombed in the hopelessness of living without God, before we are ready to feel the presence of His living light.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: