We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering...

Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.

I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.

True enemies aren’t always the ones who hate each other.

That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.

I have to wonder about people who compare Israelis to Nazis.

I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.

Bread, soup – these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.

There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.

Peace is not God’s gift to his creatures. It is our gift to each other.

We are all brothers and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive. (pg. 39)

Better than one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.

I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors...

A mn ages hs enemy because he hates his own hate. He says to himself: I hate him not because he’s my enemy, not because he hates me, but because he arouses me to hate.

Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life

The Time of the Uprooted

I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because...

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.

In any case, he had bungled his life. Bad husband, bad father, bad lover: failure all along the line . . . All the springs were broken. No more light anywhere . . . Everything...

Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. Anything is possible.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

In Jewish history there are no coincidences.

Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as...

Nobody is stronger, nobody is weaker than someone who came back. There is nothing you can do to such a person because whatever you could do is less than what has already been done to...

He had so examined his past that he could no longer look at it with enough detachment to tell what was true and what wasn’t,

Even in darkness it is possible to create light and encourage compassion. That it is possible to feel free inside a prison. That even in exile, friendship exists and can become an anchor. That one...

If life is not a celebration, why remember it ? If life — mine or that of my fellow man — is not an offering to the other, what are we doing on this earth?

Peace is our gift to each other.

I rarely speak about God. To God, yes. I protest against Him. I shout at Him. But to open a discourse about the qualities of God, about the problems that God imposes, theodicy, no. And...

Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.

Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.

What does mysticism really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It’s close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally while in mysticism you go vertically.

We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything–death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere...

I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I’ve been closer to him for that reason.

When you see the abyss, and we have looked into it, then what? There isn’t much room at the edge — one person, another, not many. If you are there, others cannot be there. If...

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.

We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.

No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night.

A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.

It” was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being usurped, profaned. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless.

Most people think that shadows follow, precede or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories.

Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death,...

Our backyard looked like a marketplace. Valuable objects, precious rugs, silver candlesticks, Bibles and other ritual objects were strewn over the dusty grounds- pitiful relics that seemed never to have had a home. All this...

I always believed that to listen to a witness is to become a witness.

It’s something that happens once in a lifetime, … It would be silly on anyone’s part to say it doesn’t mean anything. It means something. It meant a lot of things. It was an important...

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them

This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century — solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to...