Isaac Bashevis Singer Vegetarian Quotes

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") ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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? ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

We have to believe in free-will. We've got no choice. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

A freelance writer is paid per word, per piece, perhaps. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

One has to trust that God knows how to manage the world. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

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. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Literature can very well describe the absurd, but it should never become absurd itself ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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 ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

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

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. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

The second half of the twentieth century is a complete flop. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

Kindness, I've discovered, is everything in life. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

A Marxist has never written a good novel. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Misfortune draws people to religion and mysticism ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

When you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

While facts never become obsolete or stale, commentaries always do. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

The wastepaper basket is the writer's best friend. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

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

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. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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") ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

There's always a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens. ~ Dylan Moran

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. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

The characters have their own lives and their own logic, and you have to act accordingly. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

All is foreseen but the choice is given. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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