“Judaism lives not in an abstract creed, but in its institutions.”

I have been young and am now old, and have not yet known an untruthful man to come to a good end.

The silver-leaved birch retains in its old age a soft bark; there are some such men.

Liberty is from God; liberties, from the devil.

With hat in hand, one gets on in the world.

The world is the same everywhere.

Discontent is the source of all trouble,but also of all progress, in individuals and nations.

We consider it tedious to talk of the weather, and yet there is nothing more important.

Being alone when one’s belief is firm, is not to be alone.

What will people say-in these words lies the tyranny of the world, the whole destruction of our natural disposition, the oblique vision of our minds. These four words hold sway everywhere.

Years teach us more than books.

Gratitude is a soil on which joy thrives.

If you sound great in the practice room, you’re practicing the wrong thing. Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

All men are selfish, but the vain man is in love with himself. He admires, like the lover his adored one, everything which to others is indifferent.

Of all afflictions, the worst is self contempt.

No mortal eye has ever fully seen a flash of lightning … for no matter how firmly we look, our eyes are sure to be dazzled.

Some men, like modern shops, hang everything in their show windows; when one goes inside, nothing is to be found.

I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.

I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.

Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.

Psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this fashion and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and regression.

Philosophy is not in a state of external reflection on other domains, but in a state of active and internal alliance with them, and it is neither more abstract nor more difficult.

Tenderness can be just as abstract as insanity.

Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole.

All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.