If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.

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.

English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.

You are not evil, Fell. You have just been robbed of love. Of light.

Hope is alive when u know your anchor

We do have our challenges. Some things don't always work right in Washington, and the anger you see from the electorate, I think, is a reflection of what's not working right.

The absence of consistent biblical worldview thinking is a key mark of spiritual immaturity.

I think school is so important. I was good student. A rebel, but I did well in my studies. I don't close myself to anything. I liked reading and I still love learning. I loved history and German.

The papacy is an impossible job. So the best thing Catholics can do for the pope is to pray for him.

In America there must be only citizens, not divided by grade, first and second, but citizens, east, west, north, and south.

Politeness is fictitious benevolence. Depend upon it, the want of it never fails to produce something disagreeable to one or other.

'Tis better to be known as a good man than a great one, for greatness is an assessment of mortals; goodness a gift of God.