Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions.
The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the need for strong moral courage and spiritual boldness in challenging times.
In this quote, Abraham Joshua Heschel underscores the importance of exhibiting moral integrity and spiritual bravery, especially during critical moments in history. He suggests that when faced with moral dilemmas or crises, individuals must rise to the occasion with both grandeur and audacity, embodying the virtues that guide righteous actions. Heschel's words call for a proactive stance in the pursuit of justice and truth, urging individuals to act with conviction and purpose.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
A motivational speaker might use this quote to inspire their audience to stand up for their beliefs.
More from Abraham Joshua Heschel
All quotes βNormal consciousness is a state of stupor, in which the sensibility to the wholly real and responsiveness to the stimuli of the spirit are reduced. The mystics, knowing that man is involved in a hidden history of the cosmos, endeavor to awake from the drowsiness and apathy and to regain the state of wakefulness for their enchanted souls.
Prayer cannot bring water to parched fields, or mend a broken bridge, or rebuild a ruined city; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.
The worship of reason is arrogance and betrays a lack of intelligence. The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith.
We worship God through our questions.
When religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.
Similar quotes
When you stand up in the morning, you look in the mirror and say, 'I'm black.' No. You wake up and you see yourself as a human being in the world, but you raise discussion and raise aggression, the anger that you confront every day of your life, whether you want to or not.
For he who has died has been freed from sin...14 For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace.
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts.
We object not to the narration of the deeds of our unregenerate condition, but to the mode in which it is too often done. Let sin have its monument, but let it be a heap of stones cast by the hands of execration - not a mausoleum erected by the hands of affection.