Top 120 Chaim Potok Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We need to listen to one another.”

— Chaim Potok

52. “A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare – let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.”

— Chaim Potok

53. “I get up around 6:30. I work from about 8:00 to 1:00, take a break for lunch, work again until about 5:00, and then go for a long walk and have dinner. Then, if my wife and I have no previous plans, we decide what to do for the evening.”

— Chaim Potok

54. “There are times when those who fear God make themselves very unpleasant as human beings.”

— Chaim Potok

55. “But I do not know how else the work can be done. To touch a person’s heart, you must see a person’s face. One cannot reach a soul through a telephone.”

— Chaim Potok

56. “Great artists make the entire world their home.”

— Chaim Potok

57. “A man does not always remain at the same stage. He is always ascending or descending. When he reaches the top, he must concern himself with the probability that he will fall. When he reaches the bottom, he must strive once again to climb to the top. That is the nature of man. When the soul of a man is in its darkest night, he must strive constantly for new light. When one thinks there is only an end, that is when one must struggle for the new beginning.”

— Chaim Potok

58. “But today we become aware of other readings of the human experience very quickly because of the media and the speed with which people travel the planet.”

— Chaim Potok

59. “About accidents we do not have many choices. Our job is to make better the world God gave us. We are partners with God. One day you will understand. We have to work hard to make it a good world. But it is not an impossible job.”

— Chaim Potok

60. “Without the future there is no present,” my father is saying. “Without the future there can be no hope for redemption, and without hope for redemption there is nothing. A man must plan for the future.” Max smiles politely. That is the sort of talk, he once told me, he used to get from his own father. “They talk about redeeming the world for the future,” Max said. “I have more modest goals. I wish only to redeem a canvas for today.”

— Chaim Potok

61. “Weeks of longing and solitude: twin muses of creation.”

— Chaim Potok

62. “Rabbinic literature can be studied in two different ways, in two directions, one might say. It can be studied quantitatively or qualitatively – or, as my father once put it, horizontally or vertically. The former involves covering as much material as possible, without attempting to wrest it from it all its implications and intricacies; the latter involves confining oneself to one single area until it is exhaustively covered, and then going on to new material.”

— Chaim Potok

63. “I hated what I had drawn in that sketchbook. I should not have done it. Why had he asked me to do it? I hated the drawings. They were lies, stagnant creations done to someone else’s demand, and I despised them.”

— Chaim Potok

64. “I’m constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.”

— Chaim Potok

65. “Is he aware of both – and unaware? Can the mind ride two such separate tracks simultaneously? Concealed ambivalence. Hidden ambiguity. Are we so flawed that we can never truly know our own most secret motives?”

— Chaim Potok

66. “I’m not altogether certain that a fundamentalism of necessity has to argue that it is the only reading of the human experience in order to stay alive.”

— Chaim Potok

67. “I don’t work on my Sabbath. I write five-and-a-half or six days a week.”

— Chaim Potok

68. “I told her of a letter Camille Pissarro once wrote to his son about Monet’s dealers, who were insisting he exhibit only one kind of painting, the one that had become very popular with collectors. The collectors only wanted Sheaves. Pissarro wrote that he couldn’t understand how Monet could subject himself to the demand that he repeat himself. He called it a terrible consequence of success.”

— Chaim Potok

69. “If conquest is the only reason for a war, conquest from which only the ruler stands to gain, then people should refuse to fight. If, however, a war is to be fought for the defense of one’s family and property, then men should fight with all their heart and might.”

— Chaim Potok

70. “All of us grow up in particular realities – a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we’re brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.”

— Chaim Potok

71. “All a man has in the world is the now, the day and the hour where he is, because tomorrow is an entirely different world.”

— Chaim Potok

72. “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.”

— Chaim Potok

73. “Many people feel they are in possession of a great gift when they are young. But one does not always give in to a gift. One does with a life what is precious not only to one’s own self but to one’s own people.”

— Chaim Potok

74. “Another time? Why another time? Will another time make a difference, Aryeh?”

— Chaim Potok

75. “It hurts a father to see a son this way. It makes no difference what age the son is; it hurts.”

— Chaim Potok

76. “The sadness grew within her until she seemed to exist only as a dark nimbus of melancholy, and even Max could no longer cheer her with his talk and his.”

— Chaim Potok

77. “To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life – that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.”

— Chaim Potok

78. “Go to sleep, Asher. You’ve had a difficult day.” “A difficult day? I didn’t do a thing all day!” “For you, my husband, that is the most difficult kind of day you can have.”

— Chaim Potok

79. “You paint it,” he responds. “You are a specialist in darkness.” I tell him, “I didn’t live through it.” He says, “We all lived through it, everyone; all of humanity lived through it. Was Picasso in Guernica? Did Guido Reni see with his own eyes the slaughter of little children in Bethlehem?”

— Chaim Potok

80. “Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a ‘universal’ without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.”

— Chaim Potok

81. “Man sees only between the blinks of his eyes. He does not know what the world is like during the blinks. He sees the world in pieces, in fragments.”

— Chaim Potok

82. “It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism.”

— Chaim Potok

83. “Two hundred or more years ago most people on the planet were never aware of any reality other than the one into which they were brought up.”

— Chaim Potok

84. “A person must know who he is. A person must understand himself, improve himself, learn his weaknesses in order to overcome them. It is hard for a person to understand his own weaknesses.”

— Chaim Potok

85. “He became angry. “It should read ‘those who fear ideas,’ not ‘those who fear God.’ There are times when those who fear God make themselves very unpleasant as human beings.”

— Chaim Potok

86. “Had something inarticulate been handed down from generation to generation that came to life in each individual at a time most appropriate to him?”

— Chaim Potok

87. “In Russia I went to a great yeshiva, and in America I work in a carnival.”

— Chaim Potok

88. “Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I’m working on it.”

— Chaim Potok

89. “Virtuosity in Talmud was the achievement most sought after by every student of a yeshiva, for it was the automatic guarantee of a reputation for brilliance.”

— Chaim Potok

90. “Devorah tended to fill empty spaces with books: end tables, the tops of dressers, the edges of desks, on occasion even a chair. She would arrange and rearrange the books with exacting care, lining up the spines so none jutted out: sentinel rows of books.”

— Chaim Potok

91. “If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.”

— Chaim Potok

92. “Disorder and frequent sorrow the mulch for creativity.”

— Chaim Potok

93. “Some troubles do not go away as we grow older. They grow older with us.”

— Chaim Potok

94. “I held it close to my face and smelled the ink. I have always loved the smell of ink in a new book.”

— Chaim Potok

95. “Did I know that the reason Hitler had been able to slaughter six million Jews without too much complaint from the world was that for two thousand years the world had been taught that Jews, not Romans, had killed that man?”

— Chaim Potok

96. “I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.”

— Chaim Potok

97. “We have our faith. We have our work. Our work is to bring God into this world. Look what has been done to this world and its people in this Godless century. It is a horror. Our task is to redeem this horror. We cannot redeem it by offering people ambiguity.” “I try to redeem it through my art.” “An artist redeems through his art?” He seemed astonished by that idea. “Acts redeem, Asher. Acts.” “Art is also acts.”

— Chaim Potok

98. “Like the French frontier police who thought that some of Picasso’s Cubist drawings were plans of the country’s defenses.”

— Chaim Potok

99. “To remember is not a punishment, Asher. To remember is a victory against the sitra achra, against Hitler, may his name be erased. The film is a sanctification of the name of God. Why should I not participate in it?”

— Chaim Potok

100. “Without stories there is nothing. Stories are the world’s memory. The past is erased without stories.”

— Chaim Potok