Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions.
Abraham Joshua HeschelRead
We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn, or scoff at the totality of being.
Interpretation
The quote expresses reverence for the universe and existence, encouraging humility and awe towards greater realities.
Abraham Joshua Heschel's quote emphasizes the importance of respecting the vastness of the universe and the complexities of existence. It suggests that rather than dismissing or ridiculing the profound mysteries of life and the cosmos, one should embrace them with humility and wonder, recognizing our place within this grand tapestry.
In practice
This quote would be fitting in a speech about the importance of scientific inquiry and respect for nature.
Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions.
Normal 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.
The fate of an epoch that has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must...recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us.
The law of Karma is the law of causation.
I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour.
Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
'In his celebrated book, 'On Liberty', the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is "a peculiar evil." If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the "opportunity of exchanging error for truth"; and if it's wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in its "collision with error." If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that: it becomes stale, soon learned by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.'
There would be no great men if there were no little ones.
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