Chaim Quotes & Sayings

A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life. — Chaim Potok

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

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

I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy. Power to bring pleasure and pain. Power to amuse and horrify. There was in that hand the demonic and the divine at one and the same time. The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. I was demonic and divine. — Chaim Potok

It's always easier to learn something than to use what you've learned ... You're alone when you're learning. But you always use it on other people. It's different when there are other people involved. — Chaim Potok

Reuven listen to me. The Talmud says that a person should do two things for himself. One is to acquire a teacher. Do you remember the other."
"Choose a friend," I said.
"Yes. You know what a friend is, Reuven? A Greek philosopher said that two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul."
I nodded.
"Reuven, if you can, make Danny Saunders your friend."
"I like him a lot, abba."
"No. Listen to me. I am not talking about only liking him. I am telling you to make him your friend and to let him make you his friend. — Chaim Potok

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

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

Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way!
Thou art the Potter and I am the clay. — Chaim Potok

My wife believes in it not one whit, but is scrupulous in its observance," said Charles Leiden, sipping from his glass. "A curious state of affairs, don't you think? We are kosher, Fermi probably attends synagogue, Albert believed in Spinoza's God and helped raise money for Israel, Teller may end up teaching in a Jewish parochial school one day, Szilard has the soul of a Jewish prophet. And we tinker with light and atomic bombs, with the energy of the universe. Do you wonder that the world doesn't know what to make of its Jews? No one is on more familiar terms with the heart of the insanity in the universe than is the Jew, and no one is more frenetic and untidy in the search for the an answer. — Chaim Potok

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

I think that to a very great extent we are partners with the divine in this enterprise called history. That is an ongoing relationship, and there is absolutely no guarantee that things will automatically work out to our best advantage. — Chaim Potok

He taught them that the purpose of a man is to make his life holy
every aspect of his life: eating, drinking praying, sleeping. God is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only because we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly. — Chaim Potok

Good-bye, Davita. Be discontented with the world. But be respectful at the same time. — Chaim Potok

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

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

Art begins ... when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it. — Chaim Potok

You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you,. — Chaim Potok

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

Miracles sometimes occur, but one has to work terribly hard for them. — Chaim Weizmann

Miracles do happen, but you have to work hard at them. — Chaim Weizmann

It's only a book. But what it means to write a book. — Chaim Potok

The hopes of Europe's six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked, 'Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?' I replied, 'No' ... From the depths of the tragedy I want to save two million young people ... The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They were dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world ... Only the branch of the young shall survive ... They have to accept it. — Chaim Weizmann

Palestine must be built up without violating the legitimate interests of the Arabs.. Palestine is not Rhodesia ... 600,0000 Arabs live there, who before the sense of justice of the world have exactly the same rights to their homes as we have to our National Home. — Chaim Weizmann

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

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

They are so rigid,' he said in a sudden angry voice. 'Why do they not see that this rigidity turns away our greatest minds? — Chaim Potok

When the alternative is possible disaster, a man must gamble. — Chaim Potok

L'chaim. It means 'to life. — Meg Cabot

Oh, it makes a difference, I thought. And if it doesn't make a difference you will make it make a difference. — Chaim Potok

I head a nation of a million presidents. — Chaim Weizmann

Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?
I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that 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 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. Do you understand what I am saying? 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. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here. — Chaim Potok

The everyday was king. And the courtiers were popularization, superficiality, doubt, cynicism. The century was exhausted. — Chaim Potok

A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven. — Chaim Potok

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

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

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

Wisdom is the joining of your heart in unity with God's to discern His hidden knowledge. — Chaim Bentorah

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

We cannot build our lives around sickness, Asher. We must have faith in the Master of the Universe. — Chaim Potok

It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism. — Chaim Potok

A man must be forced to choose. It is only when you are forced to choose that you know what is important to you. — Chaim Potok

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

And then I was crying too, crying with Danny, silently, for his pain and for the years of his suffering, knowing that I loved him, and not knowing whether I hated or loved the long, anguished years of his life. — Chaim Potok

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

There are times when those who fear God make themselves very unpleasant as human beings. — Chaim Potok

If everybody who had brains and doubts left Orthodoxy, we would be in a great deal of trouble. — Chaim Potok

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

They become angry and ugly and they fight anything that's a threat to them. We have to learn how to fight back without hurting them too much. — Chaim Potok

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

Now I stand on the knoll before the grave of Jacob Kahn, the cypress tall against the blue morning sky and the wind warm on my face. It is the only sense left me, I hear him say. There are colors in the wind, Asher Lev. Find your demons again and return to your work. Colors wait for you in the wind. Things were too comfortable for you. An artist needs a broken world in order to have pieces to shape into art. Isn't that right, Asher Lev? Comfort is death to art. Asher Lev, artist. Asher Lev, troubler. Asher Lev, my future. His voice weaves through the wind, and I add to it the words of the psalmist, " 'Protect me, O God, for I seek refuge in You. I say to the Lord, Your are my benefactor; there is no one above You ... ' " The wind is red and black in the trembling cypress. — Chaim Potok

I don't work on my Sabbath. I write five-and-a-half or six days a week. — Chaim Potok

Literature presents you with alternate mappings of the human experience. You see that the experiences of other people and other cultures are as rich, coherent, and troubled as your own experiences. They are as beset with suffering as yours. Literature is a kind of legitimate voyeurism through the keyhole of language where you really come to know other people's lives
their anguish, their loves, their passions. Often you discover that once you dive into those lives and get below the surface, the veneer, there is a real closeness. — Chaim Potok

Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship, he told me. Haven't you learned that yet, Reuven? — Chaim Potok

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

Independence is never given to a people, it has to be earned; and, once earned, must be defended. — Chaim Weizmann

There was an unearthly quality to the way he sang that melody that night - as if he were winging through unknown worlds in search of sources of strength beyond himself. His eyes were open, fixed, but gazing inward. There was a sweetness and sadness, a sense of pain and yearning in his voice - soft, tremulous, climbing and falling and climbing again. And when he was done there was a long silence - and in that silence I thought I heard distant cries, and I was afraid. — Chaim Potok

It's my world, best friend. And I haven't seen anything outside that's better. — Chaim Potok

He looked down at the books. There was a long silence. Then he raised his eyes and directed his gaze at Gershon, and Gershon did not look away. "I will tell you, Loran what is of importance is not that there may be nothing. We have always acknowledged that as a possibility. What is important is that if indeed there is nothing, then we should be prepared to make something out of the one thing we have left to us
ourselves. I do not know what else to tell you, Loran. No one is in possession of all wisdom. No one." Gershon sat in silence, looking at Nathan Malkuson. — Chaim Potok

David was a man after God's heart because he was a man who understood God's heart and sought to protect the heart of God. You cannot protect God's heart until you intimately understand His heart. — Chaim Bentorah

An artist is a person first. — Chaim Potok

All beginnings are hard. — Chaim Potok

I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. — Chaim Potok

Do you know what I don't understand about that ball game? I don't understand why I wanted to kill you. — Chaim Potok

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel. — Chaim Potok

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

You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it.
...
You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn't always talk. Sometimes - sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to. — Chaim Potok

Einstein ... always spoke to me of Rutherford in the highest terms, calling him a second Newton. — Chaim Weizmann

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

There must not be one law for the Jew and another for the Arabs ... In saying this, I do not assume that there are tendencies toward inequalirty or discrimination. It is merely a timely warning which is particularly necessary because we shall have a very large Arab minority. I am certain that the world will judge the Jewish State by what it will do with the Arabs, just as the Jewish people at large will be judged by what we do or fail to do in this state where we have been given such a wonderful opportunity after thousands of years of wandering and suffering. — Chaim Weizmann

In Russia I went to a great yeshiva, and in America I work in a carnival. — Chaim Potok

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

We need to listen to one another. — Chaim Potok

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

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

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

It's not a pretty world, Papa.'
'I've noticed,' my father said softly. — Chaim Potok

Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and on my arrival I was fully convinced that he understood it. — Chaim Weizmann

The prophetic vision of the Temple was revealed to Ezekiel on Yom Kippur in the year 3352 (408 B.C.E.), a Jubilee Year.6 On Yom Kippur in the Jubilee Year, Jewish slaves are freed and land in Israel that had been sold during the previous forty-nine years, is returned to its original tribal ownership. — Chaim Clorfene

Millions of people can draw. Art is whether there is a scream in you wanting to get out in a special way. — Chaim Potok

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

Perhaps. But it is childish to think of what might have been. — Chaim Potok

Each generation thinks it fights new battles. But the battles are the same. Only the people are different. — Chaim Potok

Every entity loses perfection as long as it is not fulfilling its purpose. — Moshe Chaim Luzzatto

I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art. — Chaim Potok

There are no English, French, German or American Jews, but only Jews > > >living in England, France, Germany or America. — Chaim Weizmann

When asked how he had had such an impact as a great sage and leader in the twentieth-century Jewish world, the Chafetz Chaim answered, "I set out to try to change the world, but I failed. So I decided to scale back my efforts and only try to influence the Jewish community of Poland, but I failed there, too. So I targeted the community in my hometown of Radin, but achieved no greater success. Then I gave all my effort to changing my own family, and failed at that as well. Finally, I decided to change myself, and that's how I had such an impact on the Jewish world. — Alan Morinis

How should a Jew feel? There we went through the seven gates of hell for matzos. Here I stand in matzos over my head. So how should a Jew feel? You are an angel of God, and the Rebbe, he should live and be well, the Rebbe made miracles and wonders for me. At night, I tell myself it is a dream and I am afraid to wake up. If it is a dream, better I should not wake up, better I should die in my sleep. — Chaim Potok

I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that 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 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. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. — Chaim Potok

As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge. — Chaim Potok

Did he really believe God wrote stories that were open to one explanation only? A story that knew but one explanation could hardly be interesting and was certainly not worth the trouble of remembering. — Chaim Potok

It was no joy waking up after a dream about that man. He left a taste of thunder in my mouth. — Chaim Potok

L'chaim. Where there is life, my friends, there is hope. — Kathryn Craft

But it would have made me a whore to leave it incomplete. It would have made it easier to leave future work incomplete. It would have made it more and more difficult to draw upon that additional aching surge of effort that is always the difference between integrity and deceit in a created work. I would not be the whore to my own existence. Can you understand that? I would not be the whore to my own existence. — Chaim Potok

You don't want to make mistakes with people. Sometimes when you make a mistake you lose a human soul. — Chaim Potok

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

L'chaim!': To life! — Gayle Forman

Take care of your father," he said. "There aren't many people like him around anymore. — Chaim Potok

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

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