The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

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.

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.

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

Then why do you want to know?""Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.

She senses your vulnerability, and reassures that every dream you’ve ever whispered in the night, or secret desires you dared not speak, are all within the palm of her hand

I can always pray to God with confidence because my righteous state is a gift given through grace in faith on the cross by Jesus!

My! ain't men blinder'n moles?

Well, I make every song I sing personal. I've never chosen a song that wasn't.

I was classically trained in operetta from about age 4, I think.

As artists get wealthier and more famous, often their work gets worse... I'm fascinated by the decline of artists. I suspect I'll be in decline myself. It's a fact of life.

For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.

People are people. Don't be afraid of them.