Life proceeds amid an incessant network of signals.

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 successful person and the unsuccessful person are looking at the same world

There is no greater will on earth than the will to survive. These fine people, answering my father's call to arms, had the will in spades and droves. - Lord Tristan Dracanburh, Ethandun

The deeply secretive cannot grasp that protecting your secret too fiercely exposes it.

My potential is more than can be expressed within the bounds of my race or ethnic identity.

Money does not smell of the mire whence it came; it has the glorious scent of what will be.

The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.

Climate change is real and it is caused to a significant extent by human activity.

I was not a very good football player when I started out.

I say what I mean. I don't speak in code. That's why I am a star and ace communicator.

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.