What is public for you, Elie [Wiesel], is private for Frank [Moore Cross], and the reverse.

We are thrown back on the text, for the most part. Archaeology can give us background. It doesn't either confirm or disprove the Bible, but it may illuminate it.

My own interest is far more in the Hebrew Bible. My religion is more personally related to the Hebrew Bible than it is to the New Testament.

The Garden of Eden presents the same story: If you want to make yourself gods, you'll find you're akin to the animals.

If one attempts to achieve deity or to have the holy, he is thrown back; he is refused. His language is taken from him. He can no longer even communicate. That's the Tower of Babel.

Israel defined its God and its relation to that God in existential, relational terms. They did not, until quite late, approach the question of one God in an abstract philosophical way.

I prefer to have all of this apparatus - historical, literary, critical - and then, beyond initial innocence and naiveté, to try to achieve a new innocence, a new naiveté.

I think we may very well, in many areas, get likelihood, but not certitude. We don't want certitude anyway, do we?

We want to live in ambiguity. This is the human condition.

There was certainly an old law code which stands behind the earliest form of Deuteronomy. Presumably that is what was lost.

With the Hebrew Bible, you're living in an austere world.

Joblessness is a blessing

My tears simply broke through the fragile wallthat had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.

A person fully in the Self is formless, birth less and deathless. He is inside, outside and above everything that is known. In purity he is absolute and in spirit he is eternal.

Age is no barrier. It's a limitation you put on your mind.

We are sparks that must glow as brightly as possible.

A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.

By combining elements such as hypnosis, magic, neurolinguistic programming and psychology, I can make it appear that I can hack into people's brains.

Happiness does not lie in getting people and things outside of you lined up exactly to suit your desires.

Never tell the box-office man that you can't hear well or he will sell you a seat where you can't see either.

Most artists never get a chance to be Picasso, but that doesn't mean you would stop painting.