Quotes about Spirituality

To the religious man it is as if things stood with their backs to him, their faces turned to God, as if the glory of things consisted in their being an object of divine care.

Yet our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but rather how to remain human in the skyscrapers. NOTES 1 Portions of this section are based on Heschel, Man Is Not Alone (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1951).

Religion is an answer to man's ultimate questions. The moment we become oblivious to ultimate questions, religion becomes irrelevant, and its crisis sets in.

The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays for the sake of the Sabbath. It is not an interlude but a climax of living.

Standing face to face with the world, we often sense a spirit which surpasses our ability to comprehend. The world is too much for us. It is crammed with marvel. The glory is not an exception but an aura that lies about all being, a spiritual setting of reality.

To most of us a person, a human being, seems to be a maximum of being, the ceiling of reality; we think that to personify is to glorify. Yet do not some of us realize at times that a person is no superlative, that to personify the spiritually real is to belittle it? A personification may be both a distortion and a depreciation.

He who wishes to ponder what is beyond the Bible must first learn to be sensitive to what is within the Bible.

Philosophy of religion is involved in a polarity; like an ellipse it revolves around two foci: philosophy and religion.

Two sources of religious thinking are given us: memory (tradition) and personal insight. We must rely on our memory and we must strive for fresh insight.

It is not enough to think about the prophets; we must think through the prophets. It is not enough to read the Bible for its wisdom; we must pray the Bible to comprehend its claim.

Philosophy of religion conducted in this manner, then, celebrates humility before the divine, since the awareness of God's overwhelming priority decenters us and puts us in our proper place.

The role of religion is to be a challenge to philosophy, not merely an object for examination.