Habit is our downfall, a defeat of the spirit. It is habit which wrecks the soul. Living by habit is destructive of creativity. He who prays today only because he prayed yesterday -  a scoundrel is superior to him, says Rabbi Mendel of Kotsk.

A.J.Heschel, Israel: An Echo of Eternity, FS&G, p. 203

One must live and act as if the fate of all time would depend on a single moment.
A J Heschel, The Sabbath, Shambhala, p 71

The agony of our problems forments like a volcano, and it is foolish to seek finite answers to infinite agony.

A.J. Heschel, A Passion for Truth, Jewish Lights Publishing, p. 301

Many of the people who populate the so-called world do not really live. What you see, said the Kotzker, are phantoms, apparitions, specters, ghosts moving around in the realm of the lost, a large and broad limbo.

A healthy life consists in knowing what one wants, seeing an ultimate goal ahead, and hoping to reach it by means of clearly understood actions.

A.J. Heschel, A Passion for Truth, Jewish Lights Publishing, p. 21

Living by habit is destructive of creativity. 

A.J.Heschel, Israel: An Echo of Eternity, FS&G, p.203

לעצמאות תשע"ה

Israel is a personal challenge, a personal religious issue. It is a call to every one of us as an individual, a call which one cannot answer vicariously. It is at the same time a message of meaning, a way of dealing with the monsters of absurdity, a hope for a new appreciation of being human.

A.J.Heschel, Israel: An Echo of Eternity, FS&G, pp 225