To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs -- but a tribute nevertheless.

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.

Love life comes last in my life. I put real life first.

I'm not worried about repeating myself - I'm more worried that I'd just get bored.

To repeat, the way you get to the huge, impossible yes is, you start collecting a lot of easy, small yeses.

Shiva and Shakti are indistinguishable. They are one. They are the universe. Shiva isn't masculine. Shakti isn't feminine. At the core of their mutual penetration the supreme consciousness opens.

Joy is all there is. The rest is a preoccupation of the ego, unworthy of your holy mind.

Artists try to ask questions, and within our society, unless there are artists, those questions don't get asked. And everybody blames the market.

Prayer has never made you right, because right now our world of Islam is filled with abject hypocrisy in its religiosity.

Let's say there are 500 sons and daughters like you in each state. Then we could control the government.

I once tried playing baseball but I started crying.

What is science but the pursuit of the truth? What is Buddhism but 2500 years of observation as to the nature of mind?