Top 120 Chaim Potok Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “All beginnings are hard.”

— Chaim Potok

2. “Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.”

— Chaim Potok

3. “A word is worth one coin, silence is worth two.”

— Chaim Potok

4. “A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be nurtured, it must be fanned into flame. It must learn to seek out other sparks, it must dominate the shell. Anything can be a shell, Reuven. Anything. Indifference, laziness, brutality, and genius. Yes, even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark.”

— Chaim Potok

5. “Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship.”

— Chaim Potok

6. “Two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul.”

— Chaim Potok

7. “A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant.”

— Chaim Potok

8. “I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.”

— Chaim Potok

9. “I have faith in the Torah. I am not afraid of truth.”

— Chaim Potok

10. “No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate, that’s the way the world is.”

— Chaim Potok

11. “He taught them that the purpose of a man is to make his life holy – every aspect of his life: eating, drinking praying, sleeping. God is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only because we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly.”

— Chaim Potok

12. “You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn’t always talk. Sometimes-sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.”

— Chaim Potok

13. “Art is a person’s private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.”

— Chaim Potok

14. “Something that is yours forever is never precious.”

— Chaim Potok

15. “Truth has to be given in riddles. People can’t take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.”

— Chaim Potok

16. “A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven.”

— Chaim Potok

17. “As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.”

— Chaim Potok

18. “There is in my work a very strong religious foreground and background. In the later work some of that tends to diminish, but it’s certainly present in the early work.”

— Chaim Potok

19. “A choice tells the world what is most important to a human being. When a man has a choice to make he chooses what is most important to him, and that choice tells the world what kind of a man he is.”

— Chaim Potok

20. “In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.”

— Chaim Potok

21. “It is when you are angry that you must watch how you talk.”

— Chaim Potok

22. “It is inconceivable to me that a million or three million or half a million human beings will think and feel precisely the same way on any single subject.”

— Chaim Potok

23. “I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.”

— Chaim Potok

24. “As you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them – “ordinary things” is a better expression. That is the way the world is.”

— Chaim Potok

25. “I won’t talk to you about my family and you won’t talk to me about yours. Family talk is either boring or self-pitying. Or it’s Gothic, like a Faulkner novel. Who needs to talk about it? It’s enough to live it.”

— Chaim Potok

26. “I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art.”

— Chaim Potok

27. “Asher Lev, an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.”

— Chaim Potok

28. “If a person has a contribution to make, he must make it in public. If learning is not made public, it is a waste.”

— Chaim Potok

29. “Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.”

— Chaim Potok

30. “A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.”

— Chaim Potok

31. “I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy. Power to bring pleasure and pain. Power to amuse and horrify. There was in that hand the demonic and the divine at one and the same time. The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. I was demonic and divine.”

— Chaim Potok

32. “He should be careful of the influence of those with whom he consorts, and he runs a great risk in becoming a member of a large society, for large bodies tend toward the leveling of individuality to a common consent, the forming and adherence to a creed.”

— Chaim Potok

33. “There’s a rabbi in the Talmud who even says there’s no atonement for lashon hara.”

— Chaim Potok

34. “The span of a man’s life – that is nothing. But what a man makes of that span – that is something. A man must make his own meaning for life. Meaning is not automatically given to life.”

— Chaim Potok

35. “I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.”

— Chaim Potok

36. “Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right to attempt to add to it or rebel against it.”

— Chaim Potok

37. “Seeds must be sown everywhere. Only some will bear fruit. But there would not be the fruit from the few had the many not been sown.”

— Chaim Potok

38. “I think that to a very great extent we are partners with the divine in this enterprise called history. That is an ongoing relationship, and there is absolutely no guarantee that things will automatically work out to our best advantage.”

— Chaim Potok

39. “I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.”

— Chaim Potok

40. “I have always had this sense of books as lined up and waiting, patiently waiting, for people to find them;.”

— Chaim Potok

41. “Oh, it makes a difference, I thought. And if it doesn’t make a difference you will make it make a difference.”

— Chaim Potok

42. “Each generation thinks it fights new battles. But the battles are the same. Only the people are different.”

— Chaim Potok

43. “A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it’s not as satisfying in the end.”

— Chaim Potok

44. “Those mornings, the beach was my synagogue and the waves and gulls were audience to my prayers. I stood on the beach and felt wind-blown sprays of ocean on my face, and I prayed. And sometimes the words seemed more appropriate to this beach than to the synagogue on my street.”

— Chaim Potok

45. “There is never an end to our work. It is not given to us to complete it. Who completes his work? That is the way of the world, Asher. Only the Master of the Universe completed His work. And it is said that even the Master of the Universe needs humankind in order truly to complete the Creation. Without man, what is God? And without God, what is man? Everyone needs the help of someone to complete the work of Creation that is never truly completed. Everyone. An artist, a Rebbe, everyone.”

— Chaim Potok

46. “True happiness Consists not in the multitude of friends, But in the worth and choice. – BEN JONSON.”

— Chaim Potok

47. “I do not sculpt and paint to make the world sacred. I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible the world truly is. Nothing is real to me except my own feelings; nothing is true except my own feelings as I see them all around me in my sculptures and paintings. I know these feelings are true, because if they were not true they would make art that is as terrible as the world.”

— Chaim Potok

48. “A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.”

— Chaim Potok

49. “Verbal fraud is worse than monetary fraud.”

— Chaim Potok

50. “Yes, there is some thought about making a film of My Name Is Asher Lev.”

— Chaim Potok