Isaac Leib Peretz Quotes

45 Sourced Quotes

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

Isaac Leib Peretz
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!

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

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

Isaac Leib Peretz
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.

Isaac Leib Peretz
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.

Isaac Leib Peretz
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.

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

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

Isaac Leib Peretz
Many refined people will not kill a fly, but eat an ox.

Isaac Leib Peretz
Man has been likened to an earthen pot.... You have but to tap the pot with your finger. If it rings back full and true, all is well; there is your perfect pot. And if not—man, alas, has been likened to a broken potsherd.

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

Isaac Leib Peretz
Yiddish, the language which will ever bear witness to the violence and murder inflicted on us, bear the marks of our expulsions from land to land, the language which absorbed the wails of the fathers, the laments of the generations, the poison and bitterness of history, the language whose precious jewels are the undried, uncongealed Jewish tears.

Isaac Leib Peretz
We take a drink only for the sake of the benediction.

Isaac Leib Peretz
The song that from the heart would spring
Is dead for want of echoing.

Isaac Leib Peretz