1. "Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair."
2. "But where shall I start? The world is so fast, I shall start with the country I know best, my own. But my country is so very large, I had better start with my town. But my town, too, is large. I had best start with my street. No, my home. No, my family. Never mind, I shall start with myself."
3. "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 are so tragic. I see them in school. They don't know how"
4. "I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents."
5. ”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 him. We have already paid the price.”
6. "No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them."
7. “No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night.”
8. "Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world."
9. "Only one enemy is worse than despair: indifference. In every area of human creativity, indifference is the enemy; indifference of evil is worse than evil, because it is also sterile."
10. "Peace is not God's gift to his creatures. It is our gift to each other."
11. ”Some stories are true that never happened.”
12. "Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe."
13. "That is my major preoccupation --memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it."
14. “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, it's indifference.”
15. “The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, and so are you.”
16. “There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.”
17. "There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them."
18. "There is divine beauty in learning, just as there is human beauty in tolerance. To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you."
19. “Truth can be found everywhere,even on the lips of drunkards, in the noisiest of taverns.”
20. “Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercies over himself.”
21. "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."
22. "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 you are there, you become a protective wall. What happens? You become part of it"
23. “Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.”
24. "Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain."
