Top 120 Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Featured in: Morality Quotes, Hard Hitting Quotes, Practice Quotes, Quotes About Veganism

2. “Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Featured in: Quotes About the Sea, Quotes About Ocean

3. “Life is God’s novel. Let him write it.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

4. “We must believe in free will, we have no choice.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

5. “I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Featured in: Quotes About Veganism

6. “Literature is the memory of humanity.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

7. “Two important things are to have a genuine interest in people and to be kind to them. Kindness, I’ve discovered, is everything.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

8. “As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

9. “Whenever I’m in trouble, I pray. And because I’m in trouble all of the time, I pray almost constantly.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

10. “In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they’re the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

11. “Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

12. “When you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Featured in: Self-Improvement Quotes

13. “When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren’t told or books weren’t written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Featured in: Book Quotes, Quotes About Stories

14. “A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

15. “We all play chess with Fate as partner. He makes a move, we make a move. He tries to checkmate us in three moves, we try to prevent it. We know we can’t win, but we’re driven to give him a good fight.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

16. “Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it’s dark.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

17. “The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual – when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions – it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

18. “As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

19. “What a strange power there is in clothing.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

20. “The waste basket is the writer’s best friend.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

21. “There is a permanent amnesia planted in us, which just as we keep forgetting our dreams, we sometimes keep on forgetting our reality.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

22. “The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Featured in: Book Quotes, Country Quotes

23. “Sometimes you have the feeling that some little imp is standing behind you and dictating to you, but he gives it to you slowly, drop by drop.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

24. “If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

25. “There will never be any peace in the world as long as we eat animals.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

26. “Kindness, I’ve discovered, is everything in life.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

27. “Even in the worm that crawls in the earth there glows a divine spark. When you slaughter a creature, you slaughter God.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

28. “Sometimes love is stronger than a man’s convictions.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

29. “If Moses had been paid newspaper rates for the Ten Commandments, he might have written the Two Thousand Commandments.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

30. “The more you see what other people do, the more you learn about yourself.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

31. “When a writer tries to explain too much, he’s out of time before he begins.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

32. “What happened was no accident. Everything was preordained. True, the will was free, but heaven also made its ordinances.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

33. “While facts never become obsolete or stale, commentaries always do.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

34. “Children read books, not reviews. They don’t give a hoot about critics.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

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35. “To me the Yiddish language and the conduct of those who spoke it are identical.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

36. “Heaven and earth conspire that everything which has been, be rooted and reduced to dust. Only the dreamers, who dream while awake, call back the shadows of the past and braid nets from the unspun thread.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

37. “The soul never dies and the body is never really alive.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

38. “The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

39. “We are all God’s creatures-that we pray to God for mercy and justice while we continue to eat the flesh of animals that are slaughtered on our account is not consistent.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

40. “It is written, better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil. You are not a fool. They are the fools. For he who causes his neighbor to feel shame loses Paradise himself.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

41. “From borrowing one gets poorer and from work one gets richer.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

42. “A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is – full of surprises.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

43. “For those who are willing to make an effort, great miracles and wonderful treasures are in store.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

44. “When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

45. “The sexual organs are the most sensitive organs of the human being. They are not diplomats. They tell the truth.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

46. “Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

47. “One can find in the Yiddish tongue and in the Yiddish spirit expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience and deep appreciation of human individuality.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

48. “Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

49. “Man is a disgusting thing. If you beat him he starts to scream, but if it is the other one who is beaten, then he constructs a theory.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

50. “What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer