“There is a glory, an aura, that lies about all beings, a spiritual setting of reality.”
Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5<!-- The sense of the ineffable, p. 90 -->
Context: In English the phrase that a person has "a presence" is hard to define. There are people whose being here and now is felt, even though they do not display themselves in action and speech. They have a "presence." … Of a person whose outwardness communicates something of his indwelling power or greatness, whose soul is radiant and conveys itself without words, we say he has presence.
Standing face to face with the world, we often sense a presence which surpasses our ability to comprehend. The world is too much with us. It is crammed with marvel. There is a glory, an aura, that lies about all beings, a spiritual setting of reality.
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.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Abraham Joshua Heschel130
Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi 1907–1972Related quotes
Friedrich Nietzsche book The Birth of Tragedy
Der philosophische Mensch hat sogar das Vorgefühl, dass auch unter dieser Wirklichkeit, in der wir leben und sind, eine zweite ganz andre verborgen liege...
Source: The Birth of Tragedy (1872), p. 23, William Haussmann translation
“In life, the glory lies not in the quarry, but in the chase.”
Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher
Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago
“Glory in hardship, sloth in comfort lies.”
Al-Mutanabbi (915–965) Arabic poet from the Abbasid era
A Young Soul
B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar
Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p. 11
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
1950s, Rediscovering Lost Values (1954)
Variant: If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover these precious values: that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.