Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The age of the book is almost gone.
The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral.
Life proceeds amid an incessant network of signals.
Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.
I learned early on that 'rabbi' means teacher, not priest.
Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.
To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.
Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity
A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.
For many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in.
Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.
What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.
When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.
The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.
When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.
My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.
I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.
To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding
I'm sorry, I'm absolutely convinced that there is at the moment no realistic prospect for very much hope in human affairs.
If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.
The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.
Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.
Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.
The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.
The very opposite of freedom is cliche, and nothing is less free, more inert with convention and hollow brutality, than a row of four-letter words.
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
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.
More and more lower-middle-income families either live their lives in debt or leave the city altogether. The boom is strictly at the penthouse level.
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.
I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to this.
My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.
Given my age, I am pretty near the end, probably, of my career as a writer, a scholar, a teacher. And I wanted to speak of things I will not be able to do.
The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.
Self-projection is, more often than not, the move of the minor craftsman, of the tactics of the hour whose inherent weakness is, precisely, that of originality.
To be a European is to try to negotiate morally, intellectually and existentially the opposing statements and praxis of the city of Socrates and the city of Isaiah.
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.
When it turned on the Jew, Christianity and European civilization turned on the incarnation - albeit an incarnation often wayward and unaware - of its own best hopes.
He who has read Kafka's Metamorphosis and can look into his mirror unflinching may technically be able to read print, but is illiterate in the only sense that matters.
I find so much writing colourless, small in its means, unwilling to take stylistic risks. Often it goes wrong; I am not the one to judge. Sometimes, I hope, it goes right.
Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.