He who has read Kafka's Metamorphosis and can look into his mirror unflinching may technically be able to read print, but is illiterate in the only sense that matters.

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.

Robert had taught him to keep his thoughts in the present or near future, for as Robert had told him, To dwell in the past is to live in regret.

Truth in the human world, is constructed, defined and then reconstructed by the human self.

...Fastow had found someone trusting and pliable.Fastow wanted a pupet, Bowen concluded, and he already controlled Ben Glisan's strings.p.338

Man-made things, buildings, boats, etc., we see more decidedly than the other things in a landscape.

I never watched a frame of the film until it was finished.

What experience has shown me is that it takes your life to become an artist.

He who bestows something great receives no gratitude; for in accepting it the recipient has already been weighed down too much.

A good leader needs to have a compass in his head and a bar of steel in his heart.

It's fine to live in the now. But the best thing about now is that there's another one tomorrow. I'm going to start making them count.

Pain is such an uncomfortable feeling that even a tiny amount of it is enough to ruin every enjoyment.