I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.

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.

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

Maybe that's why life is so precious. No rewind or fast forward...just patience and faith.

Our character develops with endurance of every circumstance.

We 'chicks' have munched our popcorn while romantic comedies became just comedies, and then each female protagonist got recast for Matthew McConaughey or Seth Rogan.

You can now buy a pack of beer containing 99 cans. A 99-can pack of beer. Who says America has lost its competitive edge?

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.

The biggest misconception people have about me is that I'm in control of every situation. I'm rarely in control of any situation.

A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.

Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.