The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

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 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.

We must sincerely serve.

There may be certain genres that men dominate, but fiction not so much. The question of prizes is tricky because there are so many prizes.

Act so that the maxim of your act could be made the principle of a universal law.

To express what is the most moral, healthful and beautiful in art this is the mission of the dancer, and to this I dedicate my life.

Coonskin caps, Yankee bats, the Hound Dog man's big start. The A-bomb fears, Annette had ears, I lusted in my heart.

I used to beat myself up everyday if I did not win an event. I am quite open about those things now and that has been a big change.

I love to read about healthy eating and preach to my husband, who doesn't listen. Now I'm trying to teach it to my daughters.

How much can you do with two voices? You can sing thirds or you can sing fifths or you can do a background harmony.

Badly gotten, badly spent. [Lat., Male partum, male disperit.]

For oft, when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood they flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude