If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.

There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any “social contract” or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world.

The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.