I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to this.

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.

On the day the Gjallerhorn is blown, it will wake the gods, no matter where they are, no matter how deeply they sleep.Heimdall will blow Gjallerhorn only once, at the end of all things, Ragnarok.

We even had a different word for Christmas in my language, Bengali: Baradin, which literally meant 'big day.'

When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves.

The new religion without any secrets is philosophy. The old religion, said Aristotle, is necessary only for the uneducated; Confucius, Buddha, Voltaire and Lessing were of the same opinion.

There are no coincidences. Just miracles by the boatload.

Writer's block is a luxury most people with deadlines don't have.

Change your thinking, change your life.

All wish to know, but few the price will pay.

What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things