To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding

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.

People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent (Both types are crawling around deep down in the rabbit's fur!)

To let one into your mind was to give him or her all your secrets.

The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.

Unresolved issues from childhood revisit us in adulthood.

You can pipe anything to anything else, and usually it'll do something. With most of the standard Linux tools, it'll even do what you expect.

The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has 'civilized' us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish.

As I grew older, I developed a very innate passion for art. I was actually pretty good at it.

It's getting better generally, daily, especially in TV, for women in acting and age and looks count less. As more women come into the business. Change of any sort takes a long time to happen.

In adults, dependability is the fruit of maturity; in a child, it is the seed.

There was no indie rock band in the 90s at the level of, like, Grizzly Bear. I listen to their records and it's crazy how good they sound. That really freaks me out.