It took 10 months for me to learn to tie a lace; I must have howled with rage and frustration. But one day I could tie my laces. That no one can take….

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 -- b….

Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement..

the calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one’s own; to induce in others ….

When it turned on the Jew, Christianity and European civilization turned on the incarnation - albeit an incarnation often wayward and unaware - of it….

He is no true reader who has not experienced the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books, of the libraries at night of which Bor….

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..

Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in….

When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world..

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence..

To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate..

If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope..

Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language, in its crassest sense, can penetrate to the deeps of our necessities and dreams. It can assert….

I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answe….

I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to t….

Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless,….

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light..

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 hea….

Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is..

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-awarenes….