when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.
Books – the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity
What you don’t know by heart you haven’t really loved deeply enough
No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation, has any substantive relation or contiguity to that which it is conventionally and temporally held to designate.
When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.
The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
Given my age, I am pretty near the end, probably, of my career as a writer, a scholar, a teacher. And I wanted to speak of things I will not be able to do.
I learned early on that ‘rabbi’ means teacher, not priest.
We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.
My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.
Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it is the occasion for our cleverness fills me with baffled bitterness and anger.