Top 100 Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes
#1. We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#3. What do these children do without storybooks?" Naftali asked.
And Reb Zebulun replied: "They have to make do. Storybooks aren't bread. You can live without them."
I couldn't live without them." Naftali said.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#6. Whenever I'm in trouble, I pray. And because I'm in trouble all of the time, I pray almost constantly.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#7. If there would come a voice from God saying, 'I'm against vegetarianism!' I would say, 'Well, I am for it!' This is how
strongly I feel in this regard.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#8. The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#9. There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love ... In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of a frightened and hopeful humanity.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#10. When literature becomes overly erudite, it means that interest in the art has gone and curiosity about the artist is what's important. It becomes a kind of idolatry.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#11. Whatever doesn't really happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn't happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#12. Every body resisted (the slaughterer) in its own fashion, tried to escape and seemed to argue with the Creator to its last breath.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#13. There is great treasure there behind our skull and this is true about all of us. This little treasure has great, great powers, and I would say we only have learnt a very, very small part of what it can do.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#14. To me the Yiddish language and the conduct of those who spoke it are identical.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#15. It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#17. One can find in the Yiddish tongue and in the Yiddish spirit expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience and deep appreciation of human individuality.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#19. As much as I can give of myself I give of myself. There's no reason why not. And when I have to hide something, I let the character speak.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#21. Dictatorships, wars, and cruelty drive whole countries to madness. My theory is that the human species was crazy from the very first and that civilization and culture are only enhancing man's insanity.
A Tale of Two Sisters
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#23. No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#24. In many ways, astrology, numerology and palmistry are corruptions of the occult because they have attempted to make a practice out of something that is essentially imaginative.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#26. One prays for life , life means free choice and freedom is mystery . If one knew the truth how could there be freedom
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#27. Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#28. A story to me must have some surprise ... I must have a passion to write the story.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#29. Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it's dark
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#30. Atheism is a sort of crippled mysticism, [...] Blind nature has created all that we see, as well as all that we do not see - that's a mystical notion.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#32. To be a vegetarian is to disagree - to disagree with the course of things today ... starvation, cruelty - we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#33. The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#34. Heaven and earth conspire that everything which has been, be rooted and reduced to dust. Only the dreamers, who dream while awake, call back the shadows of the past and braid nets from the unspun thread.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#36. In our time, when the literature for adults is deteriorating, good books for children are the only hope, the only refuge.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#37. Some of my cronies call me a pessimist and a decadent, but there is always a background of faith behind resignation.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#38. Writing has power, but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind, but they can't direct it. Time changes things, God changes things, the dictators change things, but writers can't change anything.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#42. The past is not lost. An image from years ago remained present somewhere in the fourth dimension and it reached you just in that moment.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#44. For those who are willing to make an effort, great miracles and wonderful treasures are in store.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#45. There must be a way for man to attain all possible pleasures, all the powers and knowledge that nature can grant him, and still serve God
a God who speaks in deeds, not in words, and whose vocabulary is the Cosmos.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#46. Actually, the true story of a person's life can never be written. It is beyond the power of literature. The full tale of any life would be both utterly boring and utterly unbelievable.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#49. There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#50. There are moments of faith, interspersed with times when the smoke & flames of burning children blot out our faith ... although it flickers again. The difference between the skeptic & the believer is the frequency of faith and not the certitude of one's position.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#51. Man is a disgusting thing. If you beat him he starts to scream, but if it is the other one who is beaten, then he constructs a theory.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#52. I am thankful, of course, for the prize and thankful to God for each story, each idea, each word, each day.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#53. A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#54. The sexual organs are the most sensitive organs of the human being. They are not diplomats. They tell the truth.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#55. The pessimism of the creative person is not decadence but a mighty passion for the redemption of man.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#56. What's the good of not believing? Today it's your wife you don't believe; tomorrow it's God Himself you won't take stock in.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#57. As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#58. Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#59. I believe in God but people are liars. It's those people who say they are appointed by God who I don't believe in.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#62. When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#63. Literature can very well describe the absurd, but it should never become absurd itself
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#64. The Rabbi thought he saw an expression of perplexity in the golem's eyes. It seemed to the Rabbi that his eyes were asking, 'Who am I? Why am I here? What is the secret of my being? Rabbi Leib often saw the same bewilderment in the eyes of newborn children and even in the eyes of animals.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#65. There is no such thing as love. Give me a cigarette. In the camp, people climbed on one another like worms.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#66. But my gloom did not lessen. I knew that I'd had a bad dream, and I stood in the dark trying to recollect it. The second I closed my eyes, I was with the dead. They did things words cannot express. They spoke madness. ("Hanka")
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#67. It seems that the analysis of character is the highest human entertainment. And literature does it, unlike gossip, without mentioning names.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#68. In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#70. Of all the blessings bestowed on man, the greatest lies in the fact that God's face is forever hidden from him
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#71. The genuine writer cannot ignore the fact that the family is losing its spiritual foundation.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#72. There is a plan to this universe. There is a high intelligence, maybe even a purpose, but it's given to us on the installment plan.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#73. The New England conscience doesn't keep you from doing what you shouldn't - it just keeps you from enjoying it.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#74. I don't invent characters because the Almightly has already invented millions ... Just like experts at fingerprints do not create fingerprints but learn how to read them.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#75. Here are circumstances when you are torn away like a leaf from a tree and no power can attach you again.
The wind carries you from your roots. There's a name for it in Hebrew, but I've forgotten."
"Na-v'nad - a fugitive and a wanderer."
"That's it.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#77. People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#78. Where do the wheels of history lead? How can you be so sure that the wheels of history won't get bogged down in blood and marrow again?
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#79. I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#80. A soldier who serves an emperor has to have a uniform, and this also applies to a soldier who serves the Almighty.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#83. The characters have their own lives and their own logic, and you have to act accordingly.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#85. We are all God's creatures-that we pray to God for mercy and justice while we continue to eat the flesh of animals that are slaughtered on our account is not consistent.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#86. It is written, better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil. You are not a fool. They are the fools. For he who causes his neighbor to feel shame loses Paradise himself.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#87. Those who run around with women don't walk tightropes. They find it hard enough to crawl on the ground.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#88. Two important things are to have a genuine interest in people and to be kind to them. Kindness, I've discovered, is everything.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#89. When a human being kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#91. When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#92. Along with the atom, the personality of the Homo Sapiens has been splitting ...
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#94. I get up every morning with a desire to do some creative work. This desire is made of the same stuff as the sexual desire, the desire to make money, or any other desire.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#95. A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is - full of surprises.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#96. No lepidopterist's collection in the entire world ... full if iridescent wings, is worth the life of a single butterfly.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#97. What concrete steps can I take now?" I asked the voice, and it replied: "Go to a house of prayer and pray."
"Without faith?" I countered, and the voice said: "You have more faith than you know.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#98. I am not ashamed to admit that I belong to those who fantasize that literature is capable of bringing new horizons and new perspectives
philosophical, religious, aesthetical and even social.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#99. What happened was no accident. Everything was preordained. True, the will was free, but heaven also made its ordinances.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#100. If Moses had been paid newspaper rates for the Ten Commandments, he might have written the Two Thousand Commandments.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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