“The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man.”

“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.”

“My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.”

“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.”

“When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.”

“What you don't know by heart you haven't really loved deeply enough”

“Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity”