Top 150 Chaim Potok Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Like the French frontier police who thought that some of Picasso’s Cubist drawings were plans of the country’s defenses.”

— Chaim Potok

102. “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

103. “I gambled that there was enough strength and depth in the tradition for me to be able to make it into more than Sunday-school Bible stories. I had no stomach for fundamentalism. I wanted American Judaism to become something an intelligent person would have to take seriously and be unable to laugh at and want to love.”

— Chaim Potok

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

— Chaim Potok

105. “What’s next from you? Paintingwise, I mean.” “I don’t know. I’m between things now.” “Dawn between things or dusk between things?” “I don’t know that, either.”

— Chaim Potok

106. “I cannot pray. I talk to God through my sculpture and painting.′ ‘That’s also prayer.’ He smiled faintly, the morning sun on his face. ‘The Rebbe said precisely that. You are following the party line, Asher Lev. But we know it is not the same thing, don’t we?”

— Chaim Potok

107. “Isn’t it better to arrest and prosecute a hundred innocent people and catch among them one spy than to let the spy go free?”

— Chaim Potok

108. “Good-bye, Davita. Be discontented with the world. But be respectful at the same time.”

— Chaim Potok

109. “Basically it’s none of our business how somebody manages to grow, if only he does grow, if only we’re on the trail of the law of our own growth.”

— Chaim Potok

110. “I sat near a window in our little synagogue and looked out at the large church and wondered how a statue whose face was so full of love could be worshipped by someone whose heart was so full of hate.”

— Chaim Potok

111. “I cannot have gone through what I went through and have lost what I lost if it’s all meaningless.”

— Chaim Potok

112. “White is fearful to gaze upon for too long: it is the color of shrouds; it is all-color, the prism fused, undifferentiated, linked wave to wave and particle to particle.”

— Chaim Potok

113. “I drew that memory of my father on the roof... I drew him in all the small and quiet ways I had never thought to draw him before. And it seemed to me that I was closer to him during those early months of his absence than at any other time of my life.”

— Chaim Potok

114. “There is an old Russian saying: When fingernails are being pulled out in Moscow, fingers are being chopped off in the provinces. That saying one can take at full value.”

— Chaim Potok

115. “On one of the walls of his office hung his undergraduate degree from Columbia and his law degree from the Harvard School of Law.”

— Chaim Potok

116. “And now you’ll be able to sail right through to the end.” “I’ve already written the end. It was the beginning I couldn’t write.” “The story you just told me is part of your beginning?” “It is the myself that predates what I am now.”

— Chaim Potok

117. “I... thought the street was crying and wondered how I could paint the street crying. I thought I had said something like that to myself before, but I could not remember when or where it might have been. The street is crying, I thought, and I’m sitting here. It’s my street and I can’t draw it. I want to paint it, I have to paint it while it’s crying, and why am I sitting here?”

— Chaim Potok

118. “Gershon had never seen him so transformed, so possessed of open radiance, so easily moved by all around him, so hungry, so eager. The city was a woman, and he embraced it with all the tender and gentle adoration one brings to a first love.”

— Chaim Potok

119. “What is your dissertation, Ilana Davita?” “Babel and Camus: Twists of Fate and Faith. Babel’s The Red Cavalry and Camus’s The Stranger.”

— Chaim Potok

120. “And it seemed to me that I was closer to him during those early months of his absence than at any other time of my life.”

— Chaim Potok

121. “The Master of the Universe has so created the world that everything that can be good can also be evil. It is mankind that makes a thing good or evil, Reuven, depending upon how we use the wonders we have been given.”

— Chaim Potok

122. “Devorah told me, “Our daughter is grown,” and there were tears in her eyes.”

— Chaim Potok

123. “I’ve never known of a serious artist who was happy. Except maybe Rubens.”

— Chaim Potok

124. “I wish that your journey will be to a light not only for yourself but for all of us. I wish that it will be a journey for the sake of heaven. I give you my blessing, Asher Lev.”

— Chaim Potok

125. “In “Culture Confrontation in Urban America,” Potok uses the term Zwischenmensch to define himself and his experience of cultural conflict: “Urban wanderings that result in core-culture confrontations often shape a certain kind of individual. I call that individual a Zwischenmensch, a betweenperson. Such an individual will cross the boundaries of his or her own culture and embrace life-enhancing elements from alien worlds.”

— Chaim Potok

126. “When your world is destroyed and only a remnant is saved, then whatever is seen as a threat to that remnant becomes a hated enemy.”

— Chaim Potok

127. “A ram comes always as an astonishment. Do you know what a ram is, Benjamin? R-A-M. A random act of menschlichkeit.”

— Chaim Potok

128. “God killed my little sister. That’s right, Lev. A little girl, suddenly sick and dead. Everything He touches is destroyed. Casagemas, Apollinaire, Eva, Max Jacob. How do you worship Him, Lev? He’s the true destroyer. Satan works out in the open, cards on the table. He gives it to you straight, no games. God plays at sweetness and goodness, and kills you. Who’s worse, Satan or God? Satan at least has the decency to show us his real face. So I pay God back with my paintings.”

— Chaim Potok

129. “We cannot build our lives around sickness, Asher. We must have faith in the Master of the Universe.”

— Chaim Potok

130. “Asher, an animal cannot help what he does. A human being is able to control himself if he wills it.”

— Chaim Potok

131. “The two extremes of secular life. Stoic acceptance and gay defiance in the face of – nothing; in the face of indifference, boiling violence, inexorable chaos; in the face of – the Other Side. Two hundred years of this. Enough. Jews must return to Torah. The world must return to God. There must be a center to human life or, God forbid, there will be no human life left on this planet. A man may not live alone.”

— Chaim Potok

132. “He preferred the window to the blackboard.”

— Chaim Potok

133. “Life connects us, Benjamin, not artifice.”

— Chaim Potok

134. “She had short dark hair and dark eyes and brown skin and was possessed of the charm and vivacity often taken on as compensatory characteristics by the ungifted and the plain.”

— Chaim Potok

135. “Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it. If.”

— Chaim Potok

136. “He always wore dark-blue suits, but I made his suit light blue because he did not feel dark blue to me.”

— Chaim Potok

137. “The irrational completes us.”

— Chaim Potok

138. “A person has to have a reason for living, and the best reason is another person. Together they can make a plan for their lives.”

— Chaim Potok

139. “I will tell you what my father, may he rest in peace, once told me. 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. Do you understand, my Asher?”

— Chaim Potok

140. “We have hurt you, yet you love us. We have exiled you, yet you are tied to us. “Though He slay me, yet will I have faith in Him.”

— Chaim Potok

141. “What good is physics in the hands of a species that is still partly reptilian? We’ll kill ourselves with all that physics.”

— Chaim Potok

142. “It was then that it came, though I think it had been coming for a long time and I had been choking it and hoping it would die. But it does not die. It kills you first. I knew there would be no other way to do it. No one says you have to paint ultimate anguish and torment. But if you are driven to paint it, you have no other way.”

— Chaim Potok

143. “He thought he could sense himself slipping through their eyes into the landscape of their pain.”

— Chaim Potok

144. “It intrigued me that I had made no drawings of my father. The mashpia would notice that. But why had I made no drawings of my father?”

— Chaim Potok

145. “Traditions are born by the power of an initial thrust that hurls acts and ideas across the centuries.”

— Chaim Potok

146. “I felt a sudden momentary sense of unreality, as if the play yard, with its black asphalt floor and its white base lines, were my entire world now, as if all the previous years of my life had led me somehow to this one ball game, and all the future years of my life would depend upon its outcome. I stood there for a moment, holding the glasses in my hand and feeling frightened. Then I took a deep breath, and the feeling passed. It’s only a ball game, I told myself. What’s a ball game?”

— Chaim Potok

147. “Oh, if I could paint this, I thought. Ribbono Shel Olom, if I could paint this world, this clean world of rain and patterns on glass, and trees on my street, and people beneath the trees. I would even paint and draw pain and suffering if I could paint and draw the other, too. I would paint the rain as tears and I would paint the rain as waters of purification. What do they want from me? Ribbono Shel Olom, it’s Your gift. Why don’t You show them it’s Your gift?”

— Chaim Potok

148. “All my life I have hated war. It is the greatest curse of man’s history. War. It comes from absolute ignorance, absolute greed, absolute cruelty.”

— Chaim Potok

149. “Millions of people can draw. Art is whether there is a scream in you wanting to get out in a special way.”

— Chaim Potok

150. “I call that ambiguity,” I said. “Riddles, puzzles, double meanings, lost possibilities, the dark side to the light, the light side to the darkness, different perspectives on the same things. Nothing in this whole world has only one side to it. Everything is like a kaleidoscope. That’s what I’m trying to capture in my art. That’s what I mean by ambiguity.”

— Chaim Potok