How do I convince him that the way we study Talmud is not a threat?''But it is a threat, Reuven. I just told you it is a threat. In the hands of those who do not love the tradition it is a dangerous w...
He became angry. It should read ‘those who fear ideas,’ not ‘those who fear God.’ There are times when those who fear God make themselves very unpleasant as human beings.
Gossip, gossip, gossip. Rumors. Tongues. ‘Life and death are in the power of the tongue,’ he quoted in Hebrew.
Good-bye, Davita. Be discontented with the world. But be respectful at the same time.
Do you know what I don't understand about that ball game? I don't understand why I wanted to kill you.
Do not expect redemption if you enter the world of art. Redemption is death to art. Tranquillity is the poison the artist takes when he is ready to give up his art.
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 word is worth one coin, silence is worth two
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...
Man sees only between the blinks of his eyes. He does not know what the world is like during the blinks. He sees the world in pieces, in fragments.
It's my world, best friend. And I haven't seen anything outside that's better.
In Culture Confrontation in Urban America, Potok uses the term Zwischenmensch to define himself and his experience of cultural conflict: Urban wanderings that result in core-culture confrontations oft...
I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy. Power to bring pleasure and pain. Power to amuse and horrify. There was in that han...
Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There i...
Disorder and frequent sorrow the mulch for creativity.
And now you’ll be able to sail right through to the end. I’ve already written the end. It was the beginning I couldn’t write. The story you just told me is part of your beginning? It is the myself tha...
A man must sometimes be forced to make choices, for it is only by his choices that we know what a man truly is.
And these two elements are at odds with one another because Freud is utterly adversary to almost all the ways of structuring the human experience found in Western religions. No Western religion can co...
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...
Without man, what is God? And without God, what is man? Everyone needs the help of someone to complete the work of Creation that is never truly completed. Everyone.