Top 100 Quotes About Chaim
#1. All necessary measures should be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale. - joint statement signed by both Chaim Weizmann and Prince Faisal
Sol Stern
#2. Chaim Potok wrote two novels that I think are indispensable to understanding the Hasidic and Orthodox American Jewish communities following the Holocaust: The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev.
Nancy Pearl
#3. A Muslim allowed a topless Jew to sit on his camel. And we say we can't live side by side? I say we try and we can and we will. And you don't even have to be topless. L'chaim.
Chelsea Handler
#4. Everyone takes a turn, and when it gets to me, I shout out what Jewish people say at times like this: "L'chaim!"
"It means 'to life,'" I explain. And as I say it, I think that maybe this is what I was saying a prayer for back in the cathedral. To life.
Gayle Forman
#5. The woman I loved died because I did not love her enough - what greater sin is there than that?
(Uncle Chaim and Aunt Fifke and the Angel)
Peter S. Beagle
#6. L'chaim. Where there is life, my friends, there is hope.
Kathryn Craft
#7. So you're an angel, fine, that's terrific. Now give me back my shadows. (Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel)
Peter S. Beagle
#10. Everything in life serves as a challenge and test to elevate us. Therefore it is right to be grateful for the opportunity to learn and grow through tackling this real life experience.
Moshe Chaim Luzzatto
#11. Einstein ... always spoke to me of Rutherford in the highest terms, calling him a second Newton.
Chaim Weizmann
#12. A blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing, But the man who lves that span, he is something ... A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning.
Chaim Potok
#13. It is when you are angry that you must watch how you talk.
Chaim Potok
#14. Miracles sometimes occur, but one has to work terribly hard for them.
Chaim Weizmann
#15. A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.
Chaim Potok
#16. I don't work on my Sabbath. I write five-and-a-half or six days a week.
Chaim Potok
#17. I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.
Chaim Potok
#18. Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.
Chaim Potok
#19. Every entity loses perfection as long as it is not fulfilling its purpose.
Moshe Chaim Luzzatto
#20. As you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them
"ordinary things" is a better expression. That is the way the world is.
Chaim Potok
#21. A law is something which must have a moral basis, so that there is an inner compelling force for every citizen to obey.
Chaim Weizmann
#22. An artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.
Chaim Potok
#23. In Russia I went to a great yeshiva, and in America I work in a carnival.
Chaim Potok
#24. My name is Asher Lev ... I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflicter of shame upon my family, my friends, my people; also, I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years.
Chaim Potok
#25. White is fearful to gaze upon for too long: it is the color of shrouds; it is all-color, the prism fused, undifferentiated, linked wave to wave and particle to particle.
Chaim Potok
#26. Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.
Chaim Potok
#27. Perhaps. But it is childish to think of what might have been.
Chaim Potok
#28. Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.
Chaim Potok
#29. It's my world, best friend. And I haven't seen anything outside that's better.
Chaim Potok
#31. All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.
Chaim Potok
#32. There are times when those who fear God make themselves very unpleasant as human beings.
Chaim Potok
#33. When the alternative is possible disaster, a man must gamble.
Chaim Potok
#34. Good-bye, Davita. Be discontented with the world. But be respectful at the same time.
Chaim Potok
#35. Oh, it makes a difference, I thought. And if it doesn't make a difference you will make it make a difference.
Chaim Potok
#36. A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven.
Chaim Potok
#37. To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.
Chaim Potok
#38. The fact is that gossip, rumors, mythmaking, and news stories are not appropriate vehicles for the communication of nuances of truth, those subtle tonalities that are often the truly crucial elements in a causal chain.
Chaim Potok
#39. It is strange how ideas can float about and be ignored until they are put into a book. A book can be a weapon ...
Chaim Potok
#40. I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art.
Chaim Potok
#41. I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.
Chaim Potok
#42. It's nice to be able to retire. Comforting." "You think so?" he said. "Isn't it?" "No," he said. "Endings are never nice.
Chaim Potok
#43. And these two elements are at odds with one another because Freud is utterly adversary to almost all the ways of structuring the human experience found in Western religions. No Western religion can countenance Freud's view of man.
Chaim Potok
#44. I grew up encrusted with lead and spectrumed with crayons. My dearest companions were Eberhard and Crayola. Washing for meals was a cosmic enterprise.
Chaim Potok
#45. What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.
Chaim Potok
#46. We become like dead branches and last year's leaves and what the hell good are we for ourselves and the world in a mental ghetto.
Chaim Potok
#47. Do you know what I don't understand about that ball game? I don't understand why I wanted to kill you.
Chaim Potok
#48. The silence became unreal and seemed suddenly filled with a noise of its own, the noise of a too long silence.
Chaim Potok
#49. An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity.
Chaim Potok
#50. We will have many fights. But they will be for the sake of Torah.
Chaim Potok
#51. Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.
Chaim Potok
#52. I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.
Chaim Potok
#54. In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.
Chaim Potok
#55. It was a large store and i did not like to go in it because its brightness was cold, like sunlight on distant ice.
Chaim Potok
#56. You don't want to make mistakes with people. Sometimes when you make a mistake you lose a human soul.
Chaim Potok
#57. We cannot build our lives around sickness, Asher. We must have faith in the Master of the Universe.
Chaim Potok
#58. The blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant.
Chaim Potok
#59. Wisdom is the joining of your heart in unity with God's to discern His hidden knowledge.
Chaim Bentorah
#60. Well, one hopes that if you're really related to the core of your particular culture, you have profound commitments to it, and that you are aware of how much you can strain it before you do violence to its essential nature.
Chaim Potok
#61. I sat near a window in our little synagogue and looked out at the large church and wondered how a statue whose face was so full of love could be worshipped by someone whose heart was so full of hate.
Chaim Potok
#62. Can you understand what it means for something to be incomplete?" my mother had once asked me. I understood, I understood.
Chaim Potok
#63. It was no joy waking up after a dream about that man. He left a taste of thunder in my mouth.
Chaim Potok
#64. A choice tells the world what is most important to a human being. When a man has a choice to make he chooses what is most important to him, and that choice tells the world what kind of a man he is.
Chaim Potok
#65. Seeds must be sown everywhere. Only some will bear fruit. But there would not be the fruit from the few had the many not been sown
Chaim Potok
#67. A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.
Chaim Potok
#68. If a person has a contribution to make, he must make it in public. If learning is not made public, it is a waste.
Chaim Potok
#70. Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a 'universal' without patriotism, without home who has found his people everywhere.
Chaim Potok
#71. ... the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.
Chaim Potok
#72. A person must know who he is. A person must understand himself, improve himself, learn his weaknesses in order to overcome them. It is hard for a person to understand his own weaknesses.
Chaim Potok
#73. Take care of your father," he said. "There aren't many people like him around anymore.
Chaim Potok
#74. I'm not altogether certain that a fundamentalism of necessity has to argue that it is the only reading of the human experience in order to stay alive.
Chaim Potok
#75. Gershon had never seen him so transformed, so possessed of open radiance, so easily moved by all around him, so hungry, so eager. The city was a woman, and he embraced it with all the tender and gentle adoration one brings to a first love.
Chaim Potok
#76. Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and on my arrival I was fully convinced that he understood it.
Chaim Weizmann
#77. And yet there are some magnificent things from Freud, profound insights into the nature of man.
Chaim Potok
#78. Was it a pretty drawing, Asher?'
'No Mama. But it was a good drawing ... I don't want to make pretty drawings, Mama.
Chaim Potok
#79. Obstacles are given us in order to make our desire even stronger. The more a thing is hidden from man, the more he desires it, and the greater the chance he will one day discover it.
Chaim Potok
#80. He's not asking me to make a choice. He's telling me to take a stand. I'm either with him or against him. All or nothing. I'm disgusted with the whole business. I don't want smicha if the price I have to pay for it is to stop thinking.
Chaim Potok
#81. Now in the light of past and present events the bitter truth must be spoken. We feared too little and we hoped too much. We underestimated the bestiality of the enemy; we overestimtaed the humanity, the wisdom, the sense of justice of our friends.
Chaim Weizmann
#82. The poor ignorant fellah [Arabic for peasant] does not worry about politics, but when he is told repeatedly by people in whom he has confidence that his livelihood is in danger of being taken away from him by us, he becomes our mortal enemy ... The Arab is primitive and believes what he is told.
Chaim Weizmann
#83. I walked the streets and tasted the golden sun that lay across the city.
Chaim Potok
#84. There is in my work a very strong religious foreground and background. In the later work some of that tends to diminish, but it's certainly present in the early work.
Chaim Potok
#85. If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.
Chaim Potok
#86. Millions of people can draw. Art is whether there is a scream in you wanting to get out in a special way.
Chaim Potok
#87. A man must sometimes be forced to make choices, for it is only by his choices that we know what a man truly is.
Chaim Potok
#88. Little Asher Lev was the juncture point of two significant family lines, the apex, as it were, of a triangle seminal with Jewish potentiality and freighted with Jewish responsibility. But he was also born with a gift.
Chaim Potok
#89. He should be careful of the influence of those with whom he consorts, and he runs a great risk in becoming a member of a large society, for large bodies tend toward the leveling of individuality to a common consent, the forming and adherence to a creed.
Chaim Potok
#90. Miracles do happen, but you have to work hard at them.
Chaim Weizmann
#91. I get up around 6:30. I work from about 8:00 to 1:00, take a break for lunch, work again until about 5:00, and then go for a long walk and have dinner. Then, if my wife and I have no previous plans, we decide what to do for the evening.
Chaim Potok
#92. The human heart in its perversity finds it hard to escape hatred and revenge.
Moshe Chaim Luzzatto
#93. It is inconceivable to me that a million or three million or half a million human beings will think and feel precisely the same way on any single subject.
Chaim Potok
#94. On one side, the forces of destruction, the forces of the desert, have risen, and on the other hand stand firm the forces of civilization, but we will not be stopped.
Chaim Weizmann
#95. Each country can absorb only a limited number of Jews, if she doesn't want disorders in her stomach. Germany already has too many Jews
Chaim Weizmann
#96. No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate, that's the way the world is.
Chaim Potok
#97. Someone was playing piano nearby and the music drifted slowly in and out of my mind like the ebb and flow of ocean surf. i almost recognized the melody, but i could not be sure, it slipped like a cool and silken wind from my grasp.
Chaim Potok
#98. A word is worth one coin, silence is worth two
Chaim Potok
#99. Something that is yours forever is never precious
Chaim Potok
#100. It is the obligation of each person in Israel to raise up the Fallen Bride from the dust into which She has fallen.
Moshe Chaim Luzzatto
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