Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

Don’t limit your relationship with God. Walk and talk with Him all day, every day!

Stop worrying about approval and appreciation. Enjoy the beauty and effect of contributing to the universe.

I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface and exit through it.

A man with no enemies is no good as a friend.

Compassion seems to be the greatest power.

I suppose we all have a lil' inner or outer a-hole inside of us, just waiting for the right opportunity to rear their own beautiful buttholes.

There is no way to work your way to God. There is no way to climb up to heaven. There is only one way, and that is through Christ.

It's really a spiritual practice that I am trying to show as a way of life.

Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.

Our people shall be free