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.

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

Nourish your Nature. Be who you are meant to be.

I think the government has to reposition environment on top of their national and international priorities.

How do you make things fair?

With gold a man can do anything. It even sends souls to paradise.

A thinking partner who isn't an echo chamber... How many of us dare to have such collaborators?

You can choose to acknowledge that there is something you don not understand about God and about Life, the understanding of which will change everything.

Even in dreams doing good is not wasted.

If you hear an old parable and you don't believe it, it's mythology. If you hear an old parable and you believe it, it's religion.

The frame of the cave leads to the frame of man.

There is no such thing as a pro-nuclear environmentalist.