To be a European is to try to negotiate morally, intellectually and existentially the opposing statements and praxis of the city of Socrates and the city of Isaiah.

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.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

I'll fake it through the day somehow with Johnny Walker Red.

Religious humor is not really my area, so I probably wouldn't do anything about that, or politics or something.

What I've learned about marriage: You need to have each other's back you have to be a kind of team going through life.

Stir not murky waters if you know not the depth or the creatures that dwell beneath the surface.

I need to get a greater vocabulary than what I have and when I get mad and my brain searches for a word. I have to find different words and to do that you need to have more of an education.

I think I’m dying to get to know a particular guy. Then he opens his mouth and ruins it.

It is vain for painters... to endeavour to invent without materials on which the mind may work.

poets are born knowing the language of angels

A certain death of an artist is overconfidence.