What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?

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.

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.

Rule Number Two, Monsignor. Do not show pity.

I love my wife to death. I mean my ex-wife.

Friendship is a thing most necessary to life, since without friends no one would choose to live, though possessed of all other advantages.

The rising sun can dispel the darkness of night, but it cannot banish the blackness of malice, hatred, bigotry, and selfishness from the hearts of humanity.

If anyone is found guilty, I will step on them.

Some people plant in the spring and leave in the summer. If you're signed up for a season, see it through. You don't have to stay forever, but at least stay until you see it through.

Once you have seen the face of God, you see the same face on everyone you meet.

No one worth possessing can be quite possessed.

With the search for the Higgs, we're involved with 5% of the visual universe, and now we have 95% of the invisible universe that's coming into view. That's amazing.