Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Greatness has nothing to do with results or with success.
Jews had an outsider's eye on a lot of Western tradition.
History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
Writers are what they write, also what they fail to write.
Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.
I learned early on that 'rabbi' means teacher, not priest.
Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.
Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.
I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.
God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
Once you have a point of view all history will back you up.
The first slave to read and write was the first to run away.
A great work of art is one that continues to repay attention.
It is one of the great charms of books that they have to end.
The great man is not the child of his age but its step-child.
Education has really only one basic factor: one must want it.
Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.
No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.
Americans use the word "dream" as often as psychoanalysts do.
The most beautiful thing under the sun is being under the sun.
Sometimes, the shortest path between two points is serpentine.
If we knew each other's secrets, what comforts we should find.
Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.
My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.
A fool often fails because he thinks what is difficult is easy.
Though pride is not a virtue, it is the parent of many virtues.
To ask advice is in nine cases out of ten to tout for flattery.
Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.
Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig
The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
There are secrets that ravage you, others that make you stronger.
The appalling thing about war is that it kills all love of truth.
He who does not understand a joke, he does not understand Danish.
I came into the world two months too soon, I was in such a hurry.
The quality of leaders matters less than the quality of citizens.
Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.