Well, one hopes that if you're really related to the core of your particular culture, you have profound commitments to it, and that you are aware of how much you can strain it before you do violence to its essential nature.
Chaim PotokRead
If a person has a contribution to make, he must make it in public. If learning is not made public, it is a waste.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Contributions and learning should be shared publicly for them to be valuable.
Chaim Potok emphasizes the importance of sharing one's insights and knowledge with others. He suggests that personal contributions to society, particularly in the realm of knowledge, lose their significance if they remain unshared; learning must be disseminated to enrich the community and fulfill its potential.
Themes
ContributionPublicLearningEducationKnowledge
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about community service, one might quote Potok to emphasize the need for public contributions.
More from Chaim Potok
All quotes ββ¦ the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.
Chaim PotokRead
A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven.
Chaim PotokRead
A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
Chaim PotokRead
All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.
Chaim PotokRead
He taught them that the purpose of a man is to make his life holy--every aspect of his life: eating, drinking praying, sleeping. God is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only because we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly.
Chaim PotokRead
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Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.
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So much crap passes as information that not only does the audience sometimes miss the distinction between news and crap, the editors sometimes miss the distinction.
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