Abraham Joshua Heschel

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.

Speech has power. Words do not fade. What starts out as a sound, ends in a deed.

The road to the sacred leads through the secular.

It is not enough for me to ask question; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?

Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.

When we pray, we bring G-d into the world

In the darkest night to be certain of the dawn...to go through Hell and to continue to trust in the goodness of God-this is the challenge and the way.

There is happiness in the love of labor, there is misery in the love of gain.

Life without commitment is not worth living.

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.

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ....get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.

Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.

The task of life is to face sacred moments.

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.

All events are secretly interrelated; the sweep of all we are doing reaches beyond the horizon of our comprehension.

Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear-filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.

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.

In a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for truth and have begun striving for ourselves.

I have one talent, and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised, surprised at life, at ideas. This is to me the supreme Hasidic imperative: Don't be old. Don't be stale.

Prayer begins at the edge of emptiness.

Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.