Top 100 Amos Oz Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Fundamentalist s live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark.”

— Amos Oz

2. “A conflict begins and ends in the hearts and minds of people, not in the hilltops.”

— Amos Oz

3. “Never cut loose from your longings.”

— Amos Oz

4. “I now believe that all journeys are ridiculous: the only journey from which you don’t always come back empty-handed is the journey inside yourself.”

— Amos Oz

5. “When people have peace, they hate it and long for excitement, and when they have excitement, they want peace.”

— Amos Oz

6. “When my father was a young man in Vilna, every wall in Europe said, “Jews go home to Palestine.” Fifty years later, when he went back to Europe on a visit, the walls all screamed, “Jews get out of Palestine.”

— Amos Oz

7. “Out there, in the world, all the walls were covered with graffiti: Yids, go back to Palestine, so we came back to Palestine, and now the worldatlarge shouts at us: Yids, get out of Palestine.”

— Amos Oz

8. “Justice without compassion isn’t justice; it’s an abattoir.”

— Amos Oz

9. “I find the family the most mysterious and fascinating institution in the world.”

— Amos Oz

10. “Digo que la semilla del fanatismo siempre brota al adoptar una actitud de superioridad moral que impide llegar a un acuerdo.”

— Amos Oz

11. “One of the things I wanted to introduce in The Same Sea beyond transcending the conflict, is the fact that deep down below all our secrets are the same.”

— Amos Oz

12. “Do not cut lose from your longings – for what are we without our longings?”

— Amos Oz

13. “The kibbutz way of life is not for everyone. It is meant for people who are not in the business of working harder than they should be working, in order to make more money than they need, in order to buy things they don’t really want, in order to impress people they don’t really like.”

— Amos Oz

14. “Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.”

— Amos Oz

15. “Words create conceptions and self-conceptions and ultimately nations. They can start and stop wars. They can would and heal. Choosing words carefully is a moral responsibility.”

— Amos Oz

16. “Two children of same cruel parent look at one another and see in each other the image of the cruel parent or the image of their past oppressor. This is very much the case between Jew and Arab: It’s a conflict between two victims.”

— Amos Oz

17. “If you steal from one book you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.”

— Amos Oz

18. “Well, my definition of a tragedy is a clash between right and right.”

— Amos Oz

19. “If we don’t stop somewhere, if we don’t accept an unhappy compromise, unhappy for both sides, if we don’t learn how to unhappily coexist and contain our burned sense of injustice – if we don’t learn how to do that, we end up in a doomed state.”

— Amos Oz

20. “I recommend the art of slow reading.”

— Amos Oz

21. “Imagination needs food like every dog and every cat and every bird and every fish.”

— Amos Oz

22. “As the questions grow harder and more complicated, people yearn for simpler answers, one-sentence answers, answers that point unhesitatingly to a culprit who can be blamed for all our suffering, answers that promise that if we only eradicate the villains, all our troubles will vanish.”

— Amos Oz

23. “Facts have a tendency to obscure the truth.”

— Amos Oz

24. “If you change your diet, someone will call you a traitor.”

— Amos Oz

25. “Nasty thoughts are more like worms in the cauliflower!”

— Amos Oz

26. “I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips.”

— Amos Oz

27. “The whole of reality was just a vain attempt to imitate the world of words.”

— Amos Oz

28. “I was born and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor apartment.”

— Amos Oz

29. “Feelings are just a fire in a field of stubble: it burns for a moment, and then all that’s left is soot and ashes. Do you know what the main thing is – the thing a woman should look for in her man? She should look for a quality that’s not at all exciting but that’s rarer than gold: decency.”

— Amos Oz

30. “All of my novels are democracies.”

— Amos Oz

31. “The best way to know the soul of another country is to read its literature.”

— Amos Oz

32. “Loneliness, mother said, is like a hammer blow that shatters glass but hardens steel.”

— Amos Oz

33. “If you have no more tears left to weep, then don’t weep. Laugh.”

— Amos Oz

34. “I wrote The Same Sea not as a political allegory about Israelis and Palestinians. I wrote it about something much more gutsy and immediate. I wrote it as a piece of chamber music.”

— Amos Oz

35. “The fact is that all the power in the world cannot transform someone who hates you into someone who likes you. It can turn a foe into a slave, but not into a friend. All the power in the world cannot transform a fanatic into an enlightened man. All the power in the world cannot transform someone thirsting for vengeance into a lover.”

— Amos Oz

36. “Success flows from perspiration, and inspiration from diligence and effort.”

— Amos Oz

37. “On my parents scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.”

— Amos Oz

38. “That’s how God created us: wealth is a crime and poverty is a punishment, though the punishment is not given to the one who sinned, but to the one who hasn’t got the money to escape the punishment. The woman, naturally, cannot deny that she is pregnant. The man denies it as much as he likes, and what can you do? God gave men the pleasure and us the punishment.”

— Amos Oz

39. “Tell me, is it true there’s no word for Schadenfreude in English?”

— Amos Oz

40. “And remember that friendship between a woman and a man is something much more precious and rare than love: love is actually something quite gross and even clumsy compared to friendship. Friendship includes a measure of sensitivity, attentiveness, generosity, and a finely tuned sense of moderation.”

— Amos Oz

41. “The Jews here are actually a single big refugee camp, and so are the Arabs. And now the Arabs live day by day with the disaster of their defeat, and the Jews live night by night with the dread of their vengeance.”

— Amos Oz

42. “Almost everyone traverses their lifespan, from birth to death, with eyes closed. Even you and I, my dear Shmuel. With eyes closed. If we open our eyes for just a moment, a great and terrible cry will burst forth from us and we shall scream and never stop. And if we don’t cry out day and night, that’s a sign that our eyes are closed.”

— Amos Oz

43. “Feiten zijn volgens mij vaak de ergste vijanden van de waarheid.”

— Amos Oz

44. “Memory deludes me. I have just remembered something that I completely forgot after it happened. I remembered it again when I was about sixteen, and then I forgot it again. And this morning I remembered not the event itself but the previous recollection, which itself was more than forty years ago, as though an old moon were reflected in a windowpane from which it was reflected in a lake, from where memory draws not the reflection itself, which no longer exists, but only its whitened bones.”

— Amos Oz

45. “The real tragedy of humankind,’ Shealtiel used to say, ’is not that the persecuted and enslaved crave to be liberated and to hold their heads high. No. The worst thing is that the enslaved secretly dream of enslaving their enslavers. The persecuted yearn to be persecutors. The slaves dream of being masters. As in the book of Esther.”

— Amos Oz

46. “I have seen for the first time in 100 years of conflict, the two peoples – the Israeli people and the Palestinian people – are ahead of their leaderships.”

— Amos Oz

47. “Papa used to say that wealth is a sin and poverty is a punishment but that God apparently wants there to be no connection between the sin and the punishment. One man sins and another is punished. That’s how the world is made.”

— Amos Oz

48. “There is no freedom about this: the world gives, and you just take what you’re given, with no opportunity to choose.”

— Amos Oz

49. “Many a wise man lacks for sense, Many a fool has a heart of gold, Happiness often ends in tears, But what’s inside can never be told.”

— Amos Oz

50. “Sounds of four o’clock in the morning come to him through the window: the swish of a sprinkler on the lawn, broken cries of alarm from a parked car that can no longer bear its loneliness, the low weeping of a man in the next-door apartment, on the other side of the wall, the shriek of a nightbird nearby that can perhaps already see what is hidden from you and me.”

— Amos Oz