Top 100 Amos Oz Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The crime is the punishment.”

— Amos Oz

52. “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

53. “And when she played the clarinet it was as though the music came not from the instrument but straight out of her body, only passing through the clarinet to pick up some sweetness and sadness, and taking you to a real, silent place where there is no enemy, no struggle, and where everything is free from shame and treachery and clear of thoughts of betrayal.”

— Amos Oz

54. “Thomas Mann writes somewhere that hatred is simply love with a minus sign placed before it.”

— Amos Oz

55. “Closing your eyes to the cruelty of life is, in my opinion, both stupid and sinful. There’s very little we can do about it. So we have to at least acknowledge it.”

— Amos Oz

56. “Cat de mult seamana viata din zilele noastre cu un bal mizerabil: un pic de lumina, un pic de muzica, putin dans, apoi intuneric. Priveste. Luminile au fost deja stinse, resturile de mancare au fost deja aruncate cainilor.”

— Amos Oz

57. “And so I learnt the secret of diversity. Life is made up of different avenues. Everything can happen in one of several ways, according to different musical scores and parallel logics. Each of these parallel logics is consistent and coherent in its own terms, perfect in itself, indifferent to all the others. In.”

— Amos Oz

58. “Clopotele bisericilor si ale manastirilor au inceput acum sa bata, de departe si de aproape, dar si ele sunt undeva, inauntrul tacerii.”

— Amos Oz

59. “Israel of the coastal plain, where eight out of ten Israeli Jews live far removed from the occupied territories, from the fiery Jerusalem, from the religious and nationalistic conflicts, is unknown to the outside world, almost unknown to itself.”

— Amos Oz

60. “But there’s also an upside-down sort of happiness, a black happiness, that comes from doing evil to others.”

— Amos Oz

61. “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. And maybe kindness too. Today, you should know this, I rate decency more highly than kindness. Decency is the bread, kindness is the butter. Or the honey.”

— Amos Oz

62. “Power has the power to prevent our annihilation for the time being. On condition that we always remember, at every moment, that in a situation like ours power can only prevent. It can’t settle anything and it can’t solve anything. It can only stave off disaster for a while.”

— Amos Oz

63. “They taught us always to respect other peoples: every man is made in the image of God, even if he has a tendency to forget it.”

— Amos Oz

64. “Judaism and Christianity, and Islam too, all drip honeyed words of love and mercy so long as they do not have access to handcuffs, grills, dominion, torture chambers, and gallows. All these faiths, including those that have appeared in recent generations and continue to mesmerize adherents to this day, all arose to save us and all just as soon started to shed our blood.”

— Amos Oz

65. “Every single pleasure I can imagine or have experienced is more delightful, more of a pleasure, if you take it in small sips, if you take your time. Reading is not an exception.”

— Amos Oz

66. “To be honest, I was sometimes even jealous of those starving children in India, because nobody ever told them to finish up everything on their plate.”

— Amos Oz

67. “In many ways, I regard Sharon and Arafat as birds of a feather.”

— Amos Oz

68. “The Gentiles used to say about us: the diploma – that’s the Jews’ religion. Not money, not gold. The diploma.”

— Amos Oz

69. “A man who has the ability to generate a new word and to inject it into the bloodstream of the language seems to me only a little lower than the Creator of light and darkness. If you write a book, you may be fortunate enough to be read for a while, until other, better books come along and take its place; but to produce a new word is to approach immortality.”

— Amos Oz

70. “He always imagined that silence was somehow directed against him. Or that it was his fault.”

— Amos Oz

71. “Love is a curious mixture of opposites, a blend of extreme selfishness and total devotion. A paradox! Besides which, love, everybody is always talking about love, love, but love isn’t something you choose, you catch it like a disease, you get trapped in it, like a disaster.”

— Amos Oz

72. “The actual gap between Labor, Likud and the new central party is microscopic.”

— Amos Oz

73. “Often the psyche is the worst enemy of the body: it doesn’t let the body live, it doesn’t let it enjoy itself when it wants to or get the rest it is begging for. If only we could extract it the way we extract the tonsils or the appendix, we would all live healthy and contended lives till we were a thousand years old.”

— Amos Oz

74. “To pick a modern image we once heard, but can’t remember where: life is like driving a car with its front window opaque. All you have to go by are your rearview mirrors.”

— Amos Oz

75. “Self-sacrifice can sometimes be a well-honed weapon that the fanatic wields for destructive emotional purposes. Moreover, those who are eager to sacrifice themselves will not find it difficult to sacrifice others.”

— Amos Oz

76. “Sometimes Yoel had the feeling that it was not his sexual organ but his whole being that was penetrating and luxuriating inside her womb. That he was entirety wrapped up and quivering inside her. Until with each caress the difference between caresser and caressed vanished, as though they had ceased being a man and a woman making love and had become one flesh.”

— Amos Oz

77. “The day life appeared on Earth, death appeared with it.”

— Amos Oz

78. “He reflects that Chekhov has already mapped out the route by which one can approach a strange lady by paying court to her lapdog.”

— Amos Oz

79. “And in fact that selfsame strange urge I had when I was small – the desire to grant a second chance to something that could never have one – is still one of the urges that set me going today whenever I sit down to write a story.”

— Amos Oz

80. “I wasn’t jealous and I wasn’t resentful. Maybe it’s the people who are the least loved, provided they’re not envious or bitter, who find the most love in themselves to give to others. Don’t you think?”

— Amos Oz

81. “I read your poems with interest and found them serious, original, linguistically fresh, but first of all you must learn to curb your excess of emotion and write with more distance. As if you the person writing the poems and you the suffering young man are two different people, and as though the former observes the latter coolly, distantly, even with a measure of amusement.”

— Amos Oz

82. “Fundamentally, suspicion, enjoyment of persecution, and even hatred of the entire human race are all much less lethal than a love of humanity, which reeks of ancient rivers of blood. In my view, gratuitous hatred is less bad than gratuitous love.”

— Amos Oz

83. “But for 30 years, Orthodox leaders have tipped the balance between hawks and doves, and have been in a position to determine who forms a coalition and who runs the country.”

— Amos Oz

84. “We are all Judas. Even eighty generations later we are still Judas.”

— Amos Oz

85. “Love is a kind of infection, possessing then releasing you.”

— Amos Oz

86. “Fanatics tend to live in a black-and-white world, with a simplistic view of good against evil. The fanatic is in fact a person who can only count to one. Yet at the same time, and without any contradiction, the fanatic almost always basks in some sort of bittersweet sentimentalism, composed of a mixture of fury and self-pity.”

— Amos Oz

87. “In a short story by Chekhov or a novel by Balzac he found mysteries which, so far as he was aware, did not exist in any spy thriller. 35.”

— Amos Oz

88. “Anyone willing to change,” Shmuel said, “will always be considered a traitor by those who cannot change and are scared to death of change and don’t understand it and loathe change.”

— Amos Oz

89. “Suspicion, like an acid, corrodes the vessel in which it is put and eats away at the suspicious man himself: guarding oneself day and night from the entire human race, constantly devising ways of avoiding evil schemes and conspiracies, and sniffing out snares laid for you – this is what the Talmud calls ‘primary categories of damages.’ And these are the things that, as rabbis say, take a man out of the world.”

— Amos Oz

90. “And yet, had it not been for Judas, there might not have been a crucifixion, and had there been no crucifixion, there would have been no Christianity.”

— Amos Oz

91. “Remember this well from now on: ‘I want’ and ‘I don’t want’ aren’t reasons, they can only be defined as self-indulgence.”

— Amos Oz

92. “The sad thing is that sentimentality is constantly getting the better of my pure reason. Antediluvian memories tie me to you like a pair of handcuffs. You are stuck in my soul like a rusty nail without a head. And apparently I am stuck in you too, somewhere among the cogwheels you are equipped with instead of a soul.”

— Amos Oz

93. “Even after she disappeared, it did not settle at once, but continued to make waves and produced a trickling, rustling sound that Shmuel hoped would not die away too soon.”

— Amos Oz

94. “The world is full of men who are attracted to women but aren’t really interested in them. Weak women sometimes give in to men like that. As it happens, I don’t need a man. I live alone. I work, I read books, and I listen to music. Sometimes I have a visitor in the evening. Sometimes on another evening I have a different visitor. They come and they go. I’m self-sufficient.”

— Amos Oz

95. “The westerly breeze was light and silent, as if it had been sent to cool a glass of tea.”

— Amos Oz

96. “I am not the lady’s husband. I do not have that honor and pleasure. Atalia is, in fact, my mistress.” He allowed a little time for Shmuel to wallow in his astonishment before deigning to explain: “I am not using the word in the vulgar sense, of course, but rather as in the famous saying of the first Queen Elizabeth of England: ‘I will have here but one mistress and no master.”

— Amos Oz

97. “Once, when I was seven or eight, my mother said to me, as we sat on the last seat but one on the bus to the clinic or the shoe shop, that while it was true that books could change with the years just as much as people could, the difference was that whereas people would always drop you when they could no longer get any advantage or pleasure or interest or at least a good feeling from you, a book would never abandon you.”

— Amos Oz

98. “Een vreemde die geen vreemde meer is, begint de geliefde meteen te benauwen. – Amos Oz.”

— Amos Oz

99. “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

100. “You’ve held the world in your hands for thousands of years and you’ve turned it into a horror show.”

— Amos Oz