Self-projection is, more often than not, the move of the minor craftsman, of the tactics of the hour whose inherent weakness is, precisely, that of originality.

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.

Don't forget to be kind, you will make someone's day!

Once you learn to celebrate your failures, you are on the way to becoming the real deal!

Sometimes you have to be alone to truly know your worth.

Thank you, " I said bravely, dropping the syllables cleanly, like marbles, and secretly full of the most pathetic pride imaginable. I had spoken to strangers.

I never wanted to be rich or successful or famous. I just wanted to be happy and have fun.

It gets boring at home. How many reruns of Abbott and Costello movies can a guy watch on TV?

We are accustomed to see men deride what they do not understand, and snarl at the good and beautiful because it lies beyond their sympathies

In long term investments, you don't need day to day management.

The Church has lost a great religious poet in me; but I have lost an infinity of fun in the church, so the loss is even.

No problem of human making is too great to be overcome by human ingenuity, human energy, and the untiring hope of the human spirit.