Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes

Whenever I'm in trouble, I pray. And because I'm in trouble all of the time, I pray almost constantly.

Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

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.

Kindness, I've discovered, is everything in life.

When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception.

To me the Yiddish language and the conduct of those who spoke it are identical.

Only small fish swim in schools. (p. 31)

"Don't ever see another human being, lock yourself up and live like a misanthrope." And another power tells me to accept people, talk to them. There is a struggle all the time within me. I also know that if I stay away from people, then I have to deal with only one human being-myself - and I 'd rather have other people than to all the time have only myself for an associate. When you are with yourself your egotism grows, your bitterness and suspicions grow. You become twice as meshuga as before. (p. 32)

An assimilated Jew is a man who is ashamed of his origin, who denies his roots. He wants to make believe that he's somebody else. (p. 60)

I believe in God but I have my doubts about revelation. I would say that I have no proof whatsoever
that God reveals Himself or tells us how to behave, what He wants. I believe that God is a silent God, and He must have a very good reason why He is silent. If He would begin to talk, He would have to speak in three thousand languages and in all kinds of dialects. God speaks in deeds, but the language of deeds is so large its vocabulary is as large as the universe perhaps. So we only understand a very small part of His language. Everything man says about God is pure guesswork. But since I believe in God's existence and since God created man and formed his brain, I believe also that there must be something of the divine in men's ideas about Him even if they are far fr

Shoulders are from God, and burdens too.

The characters have their own lives and their own logic, and you have to act accordingly.

In God's mill even chaff becomes flour.

There is no such thing as love. Give me a cigarette. In the camp, people climbed on one another like worms.

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.

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.

The analysis of character is the highest human entertainment.

One thing I found out then was that pity is a form of love and, actually, its highest expression.
A Tale of Two Sisters

Along with the atom, the personality of the Homo Sapiens has been splitting ...

After a while Zeinvel said, "I haven't forgotten her. If there is a Gehenna, I want to lie next to her on one bed of nails.

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.

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.

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

Some of my cronies call me a pessimist and a decadent, but there is always a background of faith behind resignation.

The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for Creation is still at the very beginning.

Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.

The wastepaper basket is the writer's best friend.

You must believe in free will; there is no choice.

A Marxist has never written a good novel.

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.

If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.

We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.

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.

Yes, I lay in my grave. But if you lie in a grave long enough, you get accustomed to it and you don't want to part from it. He had given me a pill of cyanide, He and his wife and their son also carried such pills. We all lived with death, and I want you to know that one can fall in love with death. Whoever has loved death cannot love anything else any more. When the liberation came and they told me to leave, I didn't want to go. I clung to the threshold like an ox being dragged to the slaughter. ("Hanka")

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")

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

His eyes reflected a softness I had already forgotten in America.

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.

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.

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.

A story to me must have some surprise ... I must have a passion to write the story.

The truth is that what the great religions preached, the Yiddish-speaking people of the ghettos practiced day in and day out. They were the people of The Book in the truest sense of the word. They knew of no greater joy than the study of man and human relations, which they called Torah, Talmud, Mussar, Cabala.

What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.

Even the worm that crawls in the Earth there glows a divine spark. When you slaughter a creature, you slaughter your God.

How can we speak of right and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood? How can we pray to God for mercy if we ourselves have no mercy? Nobel laureate in literature.

In our time, when the literature for adults is deteriorating, good books for children are the only hope, the only refuge.

Literature can very well describe the absurd, but it should never become absurd itself

One has to trust that God knows how to manage the world.

While the poet entertains he continues to search for eternal truths, for the essence of being. In his own fashion he tries to solve the riddle of time and change, to find an answer to suffering, to reveal love in the very abyss of cruelty and injustice. Strange as these words may sound I often play with the idea that when all the social theories collapse and wars and revolutions leave humanity in utter gloom, the poet
whom Plato banned from his Republic
may rise up to save us all.

The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.

One prays for life , life means free choice and freedom is mystery . If one knew the truth how could there be freedom

Darwin and Karl Marx didn't reveal the secret of the world. Of all the theories about creation, the one expounded in Genesis is the most intelligent. All this talk about primordial mists or the Big Bang is a wild absurdity. If someone found a watch on an island and said it had been made by itself or that it developed through evolution, he would be considered a lunatic. But according to modern science, the universe evolved all on its own. Is the universe less complicated than a watch?

If we have people with the power to tell a story, there will always be readers.

From borrowing one gets poorer and from work one gets richer.

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.

I am thankful, of course, for the prize and thankful to God for each story, each idea, each word, each day.

If one knew the truth how could there be freedom? If hell and paradise were in the middle of the marketplace, everyone would be a saint.

What happened was no accident. Everything was preordained. True, the will was free, but heaven also made its ordinances.

Each soul must accomplish its task, or it would not have been sent here.

The storyteller and poet of our time, as in any other time, must be an entertainer of the spirit in the full sense of the word, not just a preacher of social or political ideals. There is no paradise for bored readers and no excuse for tedious literature that does not intrigue the reader, uplift him, give him the joy and the escape that true art always grants.

The second half of the twentieth century is a complete flop.

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.

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.

What do they know-all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world - about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.

What a strange power there is in clothing.

In the half darkness I winked to my other self, my mad dictator, and congratulated him on his droll victory. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth flowing from Shosha's head to my face. What did I have to lose? Nothing more than what everyone loses anyway.

When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren't told or books weren't written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day. The whole world, all human life, is one long story.

We have to believe in free-will. We've got no choice.

All is foreseen but the choice is given.

Three characteristics a work of fiction must possess in order to be successful:
1. It must have a precise and suspenseful plot.
2. The author must feel a passionate urge to write it.
3. He must have the conviction, or at least the illusion, that he is the only one who can handle this particular theme.

When the ship approached the equator, I stopped going out on deck in the daytime. The sun burned like a flame. The days had shortened and night came swiftly. One moment it was light, the next it was dark. The sun did not set but fell into the water like a meteor. Late in the evening, when I went out briefly, a hot wind slapped my face. From the ocean came a roar of passions that seemed to have broken through all barriers:'We mus procreate and multiply! We must exhaust all the powers of lust!' The waves glowed like lava, and I imagined I could see multitudes of living beings - algae, whales, sea monsters - reveling in an orgy, from the surface to the bottom of the sea. Immortality was the law here. The whole planet raged with animation. At times, I heard my name in the clamor: the spirit of the abyss calling me to join them in their nocturnal dance. ("Hanka")

When you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself

God gave us so many emotions, and so many strong ones. Every human being, even if he is an idiot, is a millionaire in emotions.

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.

The ghetto was not only a place of refuge for a persecuted minority but a great experiment in peace, in self-discipline and in humanism. As such it still exists and refuses to give up in spite of all the brutality that surrounds it. I was brought up among those people.

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.

I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.

The pessimism of the creative person is not decadence but a mighty passion for the redemption of man.

Two important things are to have a genuine interest in people and to be kind to them. Kindness, I've discovered, is everything.

Misfortune draws people to religion and mysticism

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.

It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature.

But what about the creatures whose flesh he's carrying there? A few days ago they were alive. They too have souls. They too are God's children. They were quite possibly made of better material than human beings. Since they were sinless, they were certainly more innocent. But day after day they are ritually sacrificed-angels in the shape of oxen, calves, sheep. I once wanted to become a vegetarian. I wanted everything-and I never got further than wanting.

It seems that the analysis of character is the highest human entertainment. And literature does it, unlike gossip, without mentioning names.

God is a writer and we are both the heroes and the readers.

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.

Of all the blessings bestowed on man, the greatest lies in the fact that God's face is forever hidden from him

Every human character appears only once in the history of human beings. And so does every event of love.

Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about critics.

A freelance writer is paid per word, per piece, perhaps.

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.

It is a general rule that when the grain of truth cannot be found, men will swallow great helpings of falsehood.

While facts never become obsolete or stale, commentaries always do.

That glimmer of light, surrounded by so many shadows, seemed to say without words: Evil has not yet taken complete dominion. A spark of hope is still left.

Various philosophers and religious leaders tried to convince their disciples and followers that animals are nothing more than machines without a soul, without feelings. However, anyone who has ever lived with an animal-be it a dog, a bird, or even a mouse-knows that this theory is a brazen lie, invented to justify cruelty.

Sometimes love is stronger than a man's convictions.

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.