The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.

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 truth about an animal is far more exciting and altogether more beautiful than all the myths woven about it.

I love these pet names, " she said, gazing soulfully up into his eyes, "Nitwit. Sap skull. Termagant. How they make my heart flutter!

We’re all different in many ways and alike in many ways and special in some sort of way.

The first duty of a revolutionist is to get away with it. The second duty is to eat breakfast. I ain't going.

Walk that walk and go forward all the time. Don't just talk that talk, walk it and go forward. Also, the walk didn't have to be long strides; baby steps counted too. Go forward.

Pity the poor infant. Born perfect into the world from imperfect parents.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a great guy.He endorsed me because I'm the best in immigration. And I think by his definition of the best, it's the best and the toughest.

The dream is free...but the journey will cost you something.

Ancient metaphysics underwent many changes at the hands of medieval thinkers who brought it in line with the dominant religious and theological movements of their day.

In politics, as in fishing, you don't have to be a genius. You just have to be smarter than the fish.