I cannot pray. I talk to God through my sculpture and painting.' 'That's also prayer.' He smiled faintly, the morning sun on his face. 'The Rebbe said precisely that. You are following the party line,...
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 hi...
Gossip, gossip, gossip. Rumors. Tongues. ‘Life and death are in the power of the tongue,’ he quoted in Hebrew.
Excuse me, you taught trope in Theresienstadt?
A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be...
A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven.
Without the future there is no present, my father is saying. Without the future there can be no hope for redemption, and without hope for redemption there is nothing. A man must plan for the future. M...
White is fearful to gaze upon for too long: it is the color of shrouds; it is all-color, the prism fused, undifferentiated, linked wave to wave and particle to particle.
Verbal fraud is worse than monetary fraud.
The tiny color planes in the Cézanne, like the pieces of a riddle, exquisitely explored, investigated, probed, resolved, each daub of color another piece of his answer to the greatest riddle of all: h...
The silence became unreal and seemed suddenly filled with a noise of its own, the noise of a too long silence.
The customs people were angered by my drawings. I told them I didn’t make the drawings to cause trouble; I was an artist, and an artist draws what he sees and feels and thinks. But they tried to confi...
The blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meani...
On the fifteenth of August, Tisha B’av, there had been Arab disturbances in Jerusalem. The British said these had been in reaction to the demonstration staged by the followers of Jabotinsky at the Wes...
My father's right to shape my life had been taken from him by the same being who gave his own life meaning - the Rebbe.
I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.
Good-bye, Davita. Be discontented with the world. But be respectful at the same time.
Basically it’s none of our business how somebody manages to grow, if only he does grow, if only we’re on the trail of the law of our own growth.
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...
You paint it, he responds. You are a specialist in darkness. I tell him, I didn’t live through it. He says, We all lived through it, everyone; all of humanity lived through it. Was Picasso in Guernica...