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.

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.

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

Not truth but faith it is that keeps the world alive.

All my favorite movies are American movies since I was a kid.

Never ask anyone over 70 how they feel. They'll tell you.

The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.

Quarrel with a friend - and you are both wrong.

If I could have gave more, I would have done it. I gave everything I had

Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.

At one point, CERN was toying with patenting the World Wide Web.

Sometimes sweat is the best form of therapy.

Happiness comes to them who bring happiness to others.