There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.

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.

I mean, at the end of the day, what the hell does it matter who I end up with if it can't be you?

Nothing recedes like success.

The value of government to the people it serves is in direct relationship to the interest citizens themselves display in the affairs of state.

The more veiled becomes the outside world, steadily losing in colour, tone and passions, the more urgently the inner world calls us

Nature goes to the same place to create a galaxy of stars: a cluster of nebulas, a rain forest, a human body, or a thought. That place is Spirit.

Being productive and being busy are not necessarily the same thing. Doing things won’t create your success; doing the right things will.

I'd like people to understand that I do have some personality.

I want to do well and I want to fit in.

Nothing's too girly and nothing's too masculine. But I do love color, and maybe that's a little girly - especially pink.

Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.