Indifference is the sign of sickness, a sickness of the soul more contagious than any other.

My ambition really was, even as a child, to be a writer, a commentator, and a teacher, but a teacher of Talmud.

Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to life as long as God himself

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

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

We've sort of agreed that the account of Adam and Eve is a story.