Isaac Leib Peretz

"Youth is fair, a graceful stag, Leaping, playing in a park. Age is gray, a toothless hag, Stumbling in the dark."

"I want to soar the boundless blue Where winds and tempests have their birth, And let the clouds conceal for me Not heaven, but the earth."

"Ugliness is the greatest of all sins."

"We take a drink only for the sake of the benediction."

"The bigger the merchant the smaller the Jew."

"Children... constitute man's eternity."

"[Christianity] is a denial of this world, a severance from reality, an abdication, a means of redemption from, not for, life."

"They are all so-called Christian nations, but... this superimposed religion... does not penetrate into the core of their souls. It has no relation to their daily experience... It is a key to open a heaven after death and not a key with which to force open the portals of this life."

""For the commandment is a lamp" [Prov. 6.23]. And the spark which kindles the commandment is devotion."

"[About the diaspora] Canaan is too small for God's children. The Land of Israel will spread through all lands!"

"The worst dog gets the best bone."

"To be of the eternal, you must be of the earth."

"We become more united in exile than in Palestine."

"A letter depends on how you read it, a melody on how you sing it."

"The soul is imprisoned in the body, and the Lord... built two windows in the wall of the prison... Unfortunately, the windows have curtains—eyelids; and a man whose soul is impure, feeling himself scrutinized, lets down the curtains and conceals the soul."

"According to the generation is the music thereof."

"Human lips are now forbidden to utter His name, for being the only God, He needs no name."

"Little houses in a row, Down a quiet lane; Neither doors nor windows know, Peace and darkness reign. Though you cannot pay the rent, You will dwell there with the best. Where the weary, broken, spent, Find eternal rest!"

"Not all Hasidim are hasidim."

"The Hebrew language... is the only glue which holds together our scattered bones. It also holds together the rings in the chain of time.... It binds us to those who built pyramids, to those who shed their blood on the ramparts of Jerusalem, and to those who, at the burning stakes, cried Shema Yisrael!"

"A people's memory is history; and as a man without a memory, so a people without a history cannot grow wiser, better."

"We are more than a people.... We are of a pure blood."

"[About Jews] Sheer egotism compels us to the purest love of mankind as a whole.... Our hearts are like a sponge, receptive to all the newest humanitarian ideas; and our sympathy goes out to all the unfortunate, all the oppressed."

"[About Jews] Among other nations, the vital problems are: a good crop, extension of the boundaries, strong armies, colonies; among us, if we wish to be true to ourselves, the vital questions are: conscience, freedom, culture, ethics."

"[About Jews] By nature we are like all other human beings, yet our people is unlike others, because our life is different, our history is different, our teacher is the Exile."

"In the hands of the Jew, the reddest of all flags has been placed forcibly, and he has been told: "Go, go on and on, with all the liberators, with all fighters for a better tomorrow, with all destroyers of Sodoms. But never may you rest with them.... Pay everywhere the bloodiest costs of liberation, but be unnamed in all emancipation proclamations, or be rarely and scarcely mentioned."… The people cursed and blessed to be the last of the redeemed, to be eternally bleeding, the highest soaring expression of the divine in life."

"One God, one Law, one people, and one land."

"He who provides life provides also a living."

"[About loyalty to Judaism] Don't assume, Jewish intellectuals, that you are doing your duty by working... for so-called Humanity.... You are lighting a fire beneath the open sky, while your own family in your own house is freezing."

"With the same bricks one may erect... a palace or a prison.... The same letters are used in Holy Writ and heretical works."

"A heap of bricks is not yet a house."

"The ancient Greeks and Romans tell of a golden age in the past.... Our Messiah alone belongs to the future. He still has to make his appearance, and not solely for the benefit of his own people. The whole world must be judged and redeemed."

"A Jew waits for Messiah to come and redeem the world from fear and pain, from the cataclysmic conflicts between rich and poor. All shall enjoy the earth. This means, in popular imagination, that bread and clothes shall grow, ready-made, on trees. Do you have more winged ideals?"

"There are melodies that must have words... and melodies that sing themselves without words. The latter are of a higher grade. But these, too, depend on a voice and lips,... hence are not yet altogether pure, not yet genuine spirit. Genuine melody sings itself without a voice. It sings inside, within the heart, in man's very entrails!"

"At the Throne of Glory it is not the nobly-born that are beloved, but the nobly-risen."

"We should get out of the ghetto, but we should get out as Jews, with our own spiritual treasures. We should interchange, give and take, but not beg. Ghetto is impotence. Cultural cross-fertilization is the only possibility for human development."

"Prayer sometimes dulls the hunger of the pauper, like a mother's finger thrust into the mouth of her starving baby."

""May all unite to do Thy will with a perfect heart!"… Thus prays the Jew. Have you more beautiful prayers to offer?"

"In the second and third exiles we have served as a living protest against greed and hate, against physical force, against "might makes right"!"

"Purim is the birthday of the first Schutz-Jude, the first Jewish toady to foreign royalty."

"You are the weakest and the least, and the last to be redeemed.... You will be freed, when man will rise above the earthly, when human worms will turn into human eagles."

"Many refined people will not kill a fly, but eat an ox."

"I fear you. As victors, you may become the bureaucracy: doling out to each his bit as in a poorhouse, assigning to each his task as in a prison. And you will exterminate the creator of new worlds,—the free human will, and stop up the purest well of human happiness—the power of the one to face thousands, to stand up to peoples and generations."

"The song that from the heart would spring Is dead for want of echoing."

"Jews are likened to sand: tiny grains, dry and scattered, each separate from the other."

"We are like fish In this vast sea. And Satan fishes For you and me."

"It is not only individuals—peoples too cannot live merely for themselves. The whole world must be redeemed."

"Prosperity may be found in small as in big business."

"Rather a stone, but to be alone!"

"Don't look up to heaven, for what will you see in the sky, except stars, luminous but cold, wholly insensitive to pity?"