On everything you need to hear other people's opinions. It's the only way to do things. You ask a friend's advice and then between the two of you things somehow get clearer.

At the age of nineteen and a half, I went to the Land of Israel to till its soil and live by the labour of my hands. As I did not find work, I sought my livelihood elsewhere.

But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem.

God in heaven sits on high and plays games with us. He has plenty to do up there, what with building worlds and then knocking them down again, breaking things up and then rebuilding them, and yet he can manage to put his mind even to a little grocer in his shop or to a babe in the cradle.

The fate of the singers who, like my songs, went up in flame was also the fate of the books which I later wrote. All of them went up in flame to Heaven in a fire which broke out one night at my home in Bad Homburg as I lay ill in a hospital.

Through a historical catastrophe - the destruction of Jerusalem by the emperor of Rome - I was born in one of the cities in the diaspora. But I always deemed myself a child of Jerusalem, one who is in reality a native of Jerusalem.

When I first began to combine letters other than Hebrew, I read every book in German that came my way, and from these I certainly received according to the nature of my soul.