Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.

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.

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but I will surely kill you.

The lucky fellow is the plucky fellow who has been burning midnight oil and taking defeat after defeat with a smile.

Beauty is not just a white girl. It's so many different flavors and shades.

There is also a particular frustration that I have with language. It's so clumsy. And the reason I'm feeling that is more because on your breathing and your intonation than the actual words.

if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.

Grizzly bears eat people without the benefit of music.

Both men and women are fallible. The difference is, women know it.

There was a time in my life when I almost thought I could never lose a single duel of chess.

I personally have a background of many days on end of confusion, understimulation, overstimulation, and uncomfortableness with the world around me.

Probably the people around me and the people I care about. They are my motivation. That's probably what drives me to succeed. Family and friends.