My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

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.

Your eyes see me in ways the mirror never could.

You are a child of humanity and every day is your precious birthday.

Individual and national rights to wealth rest on the basis of civil and international law, or at least of custom that has the force of law.

If there ever comes a day when the Saints interfere with the rights of others to live as they see fit, you can know with assurance that the Church is no longer led by a Prophet, but a mere man.

Although the gospels of the New Testament-- like those discovered at Nag Hammadi-- are attributed to Jesus' followers, no one knows who actually wrote any of them.

Must! Is must a word to be addressed to princes? Little man, little man! Thy father, if he had been alive, durst not have used that word.

What will be the death of me are buillabaisses, food spiced with pimiento, shellfish, and a load of exquisite rubbish which I eat in disproportionate quantities.

My fans will tell you all day that I can rap. That's all I need.

I am more strongly confirmed than ever in the belief that the time devoted to chess is literally frittered away.

Don't expect your spouse to be perfect. He/she is only the dunya version of themselves. Their 'perfect' version is saved for jennah.