A Quote by Abraham Joshua Heschel

Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Quote Topics

Amazement Attitude Characteristic Chief History Man Nature Radical Religious Religious Man Toward Wonder

Quote Author

Abraham Joshua Heschel
Polish - Philosopher
January 11, 1907 - December 23, 1972

The religious quality of Marxism also explains a characteristic attitude of the orthodox Marxist toward opponents. To him, as to any believer in a Faith, the opponent is not merely in error but in sin. Dissent is disapproved of not only intellectually but also morally. There cannot be any excuse for it once the Message has been revealed.

Joseph A. Schumpeter

We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

Rachel Carson

Culture defines who we are and how we see ourselves. A new attitude toward nature provides space for a new attitude toward culture and the role it plays in sustainable development

Wangari Maathai

A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude toward God.

T. S. Eliot

The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech - it is a gift from heart to heart.

Willa Cather

In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.

Richard M. Nixon

Remove from the history of the past all those actions which have either sprung directly from the religious nature of man, or been modified by it, and you have the history of another world and of another race.

Mark Hopkins

If being an advocate of peace, justice, and humanity toward all human beings is radical, then I'm glad to be called radical. And if it is radical to oppose the use of 70 percent of federal monies for destruction and war, then I am a radical.

Ron Dellums

I think fundamentalism is this radical attitude toward one's own identity and civilization as compared to other people's identities and cultures.

Samuel P. Huntington

Man reacts upon and toward the external universe in three ways, namely, by his active nature ; by his intellectual nature ; by his moral nature - that is, he acts upon it, thinks about it, and feels toward it.

Richard Maurice Bucke

The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare.

Michael Crichton

... the ecological problem of our times demands a radical reevaluation of how we see the entire world; it demands a different interpretation of matter and the world, a new attitude of humankind toward nature, and a new understanding of how we acquire and make use of our material goods.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople

Wonder, or radical amazement, is a way of going beyond what is given in thing and thought, refusing to take anything for granted, to regard anything as final. It is our honest response to the grandeur and mystery of reality our confrontation with that which transcends the given.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Technology is neutral and sterile. Now, technology is the nature of modern man; it is our environment and our horizon. Of course, every work of man is a negation of nature, but at the same time, it is a bridge between nature and us. Technology changes nature in a more radical and decisive manner: it throws it out.

Octavio Paz

The capacity for the accomplishment of religious virtuosos the "intellectual sacrifice" is the decisive characteristic of the positively religious man. That this is so is shown by the fact that in spite of (or rather in consequence) of theology (which unveils it) the tension between the value-spheres of "science" and the sphere of "the holy" is unbridgeable.