The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.

The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.

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.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.

Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.

The age of the book is almost gone.

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

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

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.

Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

Every one of my opponents, every one of my critics, will tell you that I am a generalist spread far too thin in an age when this is not done anymore, when responsible knowledge is specialized knowledge.

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 believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.

I find so much writing colourless, small in its means, unwilling to take stylistic risks. Often it goes wrong; I am not the one to judge. Sometimes, I hope, it goes right.

I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.

I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.

I learned early on that 'rabbi' means teacher, not priest.

I'm sorry, I'm absolutely convinced that there is at the moment no realistic prospect for very much hope in human affairs.

It took 10 months for me to learn to tie a lace; I must have howled with rage and frustration. But one day I could tie my laces. That no one can take from you. I profoundly distrust the pedagogy of ease.

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

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

A good deal of classical music is today the opium of the good citizen.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.

A sentence always means more. Even a single word, within the weave of incommensurable connotation, can, and usually does.

The calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one's own; to induce in others a love for that which one loves; to make of one's inward present their future; that is a threefold adventure like no other.

The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.

The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral.

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

If you're doing something new you've got to have a vision. You've got to have a perspective. You've got to have some north star you're aiming for, and you just believe somehow you'll get there, which kind of gets to the passion point.

I have some strategical vision, I could calculate some few moves ahead and I have an intellect that is badly missed in the country which is run by generals and colonels.

One needs a Seer's Vision and an Angel's voice to be of any avail. I do not know of any Indian man or woman today who has those gifts in their most complete measure.

From my very first day in the Mayor's office, I have worked closely with the Council members who share our vision of a city hall that really protects taxpayers and cares... yes... about the little things that make a big difference in people's lives.

As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.

There are actually very few US politicians who have integrity and vision.

It seems some have chosen to ignore or have simply forgotten the big-picture vision promoted by Dr. King and his kin.

Capital isn't scarce; vision is.

Is life so wretched? Isn't it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up.

One is, that they will feel about you that you're going to make something wonderful for them. And they help you by expressing themselves. Not telling you how to do it, but encouraging you and accepting your vision and working with you on that kind of a level.

This constitution recognises the need for social dialogue involving labour and management; it involves trade unions in the decision-making process; it has a social vision founded on social dialogue.

I was raised a Christian, but I wouldn't call myself a Christian now. I think when I was younger it was easier to focus on the negative, nihilist vision... this is sort of picking up on the other half of the body, which is God and white light.

The power of a book lies in its power to turn a solitary act into a shared vision. As long as we have books, we are not alone.

My vision is to have an independent Kosovo, democratic, with a politically tolerant society and with a solid economy, integrated into the EU, the NATO and to continue with our good relations with the USA.