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

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.

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.

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

What if everything you have been taught is all a lie and everything you feel is all a truth?

On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.

The visual of Satan isn’t one of a big red devil with horns. Even worse, it’s the picture of something good, twisted enough to be compelling.

I would never become a big, big model in the commercial sense because I was such a type; you couldn't use me in everything.

Leave him alone!" Debbie shouted. "Shut up, please, or I'll kill you," Mr Tiny replied.

It is exceedingly deleterious to withdraw the sanction of religion from amusement. If we feel that it is all injurious we should strip the earth of its flowers and blot out its pleasant sunshine.

When someone deeply listens to you, your barefeet are on the earth, and a beloved land that seemed distant, is now at home within you.

The way we spend our time defines who we are.

Even if you are divine, you don't disdain male consorts.

...if I need to apologize for misrepresenting God's love I'd rather apologize for overstating His love than for understating it.