I learned early on that 'rabbi' means teacher, not priest.

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.

Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields.

We love women in proportion to their degree of strangeness to us.

Ensuring all kids have access to an effective, talented teacher needs to be a national priority.

Don't let what other people think decide who you are.

To know how scientists engage in visual imagery is to understand how they think creatively.

The love ofChrist is my prayer-book

Intellectual curiosity drove Einstein to some of the world's most important discoveries.

It's a good thing he broke up with you because now you're free for when the right man finds you. Your prince is on his way." "Right. I'm sure he was on his way but a truck hit him.

There will be a machina mundi whose centre, so to speak, is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere, for God is its circumference and centre and He is everywhere and nowhere.

Right is more beautiful than private affection, and is compatible with universal wisdom.