The age of the book is almost gone.

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.

Grateful souls focus on the happiness and abundance present in their lives and this in turn attracts more abundance and joy towards them.

We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal).

The bacteriologist, often risking his life to find cures for lethal afflictions, was another kind of imperial hero, as brave in his way as the soldier-explorer.

I acknowledge that the kingdom of God is with me

The greatest wealth is contentment with a little.

While I've said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about the South.

Danny DeVito later told me that he knew he wanted me for 'Matilda' the second I walked in the door. I'm not sure if this is true, or if he was just being nice, but I was thrilled when I got it.

I don't think film actors need training, really.

The word poet literally means maker: anything which is not well made doesn't exist.

Never measure your life by possessions. Measure it by the hearts you've touched, the smiles you created & the love you shared.