Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.

If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?

Conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were learning to unravel, was poetry.

Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.

The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat.

Perhaps Kafka laughed when he told stories [. . . ] because one isn't always equal to oneself.

Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.