I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.

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.

My main task as an artist is to show you either what you have never seen before -- or to show you what you have seen countless times, in a way you've never seen it.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.

I've dealt with politicians my entire life. You never make a bad deal with a politician. They're so easy.

Ideas and thoughts collide and sort themselves out in these fruitful collisions.

In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!

This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. Welcome and entertain them all!

In Italy they take cheap cloth and make it look expensive, but I take expensive cloth and make it look cheap. They just don't understand.

You can't make a record if you ain't got nothin' to say.