“The great sickness and the grievous evil consist in this: that all the things that man finds written in books, he presumes to think of as true-and all the more so if the books are old.”

Do not imagine that these most difficult problems can be thoroughly understood by any one of us.

Lose with truth and right rather than gain with falsehood and wrong.

The key to the understanding and to the full comprehension of all that the Prophets have said is found in the knowledge of the figures, their general ideas, and the meaning of each word they contain.

There is no difference between the worry of a human mother and an animal mother for their offspring. A mother’s love does not derive from the intellect but from the emotions, in animals just as in humans.

Commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still.

Teach thy tongue to say ‘I do not know,’ and thou shalt progress.

Man’s obsession to add to his wealth and honor is the chief source of his misery.

I will destroy my enemies by converting them to friends.

It is man’s duty to love and to fear God, even without hope of reward or fear of punishment.

It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.

All the evils that men cause to each other because of certain desires, or opinions or religious principles, are rooted in ignorance. [All hatred would come to an end] when the earth was flooded with the knowledge of God.

There are eight levels of charity. The highest is when you strengthen a man’s hand until he need no longer be dependent upon others.

It is hard for a woman with whom an uncircumcised man has had sexual intercourse to separate from him. In my opinion this is the strongest of the reasons for circumcision.

All forces that reside in the body are angels.

One should see the world, and see himself as a scale with an equal balance of good and evil. When he does one good deed the scale is tipped to the good – he and the world is saved. When he does one evil deed the scale is tipped to the bad – he and the world is destroyed.

All attributes ascribed to God are attributes of His acts, and do not imply that God has any qualities.

The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.

People say to me so often, ‘Jane how can you be so peaceful when everywhere around you people want books signed, people are asking these questions and yet you seem peaceful,’ and I always answer that it is the peace of the forest that I carry inside.

Books are a narcotic.

The misconception is that standup comics are always on. I don’t know any really funny comics that are annoying and constantly trying to be funny all the time.

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life, it’s The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that’s not enough anymore.

All of my books deal in a very rough, rude fashion with subjects about which there are great conflicts of opinion.

Historian Robert Paxton begins one of his books by asserting: Fascism was the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain.