To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.

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.

Curious how even a little time can alter so much.

Today, among little girls especially, princesses and the romanticised ideal they represent - finding the man of your dreams - have a limited shelf life.

We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.

Those who love the Gospel will love to be stirred by its truth all over again.

Every present moment will offer itself as a window onto eternity, a doorway to the infinite.

My face carries all of my memories. Why would I erase them?

I think that any important educational goal can be realized via several routes.

You can run,” Dorian said in a neutral tone that did nothing to lessen the intensity of his expression, “but sooner or later, you run out of places to run to.

You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.

Be a light, not a judge. Be a model, not a critic