Top 120 Chaim Potok Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Do not expect redemption if you enter the world of art. Redemption is death to art. Tranquillity is the poison the artist takes when he is ready to give up his art.”

— Chaim Potok

102. “Is it better for man to live with uncertainty? Is the answer of Freud an answer? We should simply learn to accept our position as strange sick creatures? Is the answer of Nietzsche an answer? We should learn to live gladly as guests in a murderous but fascinating world that cares nothing about our presence?”

— 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. “How memory accordions time and places disparate moments next to one another like photographic slides on a tray!”

— Chaim Potok

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

— 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. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Chaim Potok

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Chaim Potok

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

— Chaim Potok

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Chaim Potok

128. “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

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

— Chaim Potok

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Chaim Potok