Top 120 Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “What do they know-all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world – about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

52. “In God’s mill even chaff becomes flour.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

53. “How can we speak of right and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood? How can we pray to God for mercy if we ourselves have no mercy? Nobel laureate in literature.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

54. “Those who run around with women don’t walk tightropes. They find it hard enough to crawl on the ground.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

55. “They still believe in God, the family, angels, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other obsolete stuff.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

56. “The genuine writer cannot ignore the fact that the family is losing its spiritual foundation.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

57. “The analysis of character is the highest human entertainment.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

58. “The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God’s plan for Creation is still at the very beginning.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

59. “Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man’s thinking or his writing.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

60. “No matter how much you know a human being, you don’t know him enough.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

61. “To be a vegetarian is to disagree – to disagree with the course of things today. Starvation, world hunger, cruelty, waste, wars – we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it’s a strong one.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

62. “There is no such thing as love. Give me a cigarette. In the camp, people climbed on one another like worms.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

63. “In our time, when the literature for adults is deteriorating, good books for children are the only hope, the only refuge.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

64. “If we have people with the power to tell a story, there will always be readers.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

65. “Each soul must accomplish its task, or it would not have been sent here.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

66. “When we’re trying to decide whether a leader is a good leader or a bad one, the question to ask is: ‘Is he with the Ten Commandments or is he against them?’ Then you can determine if the leader is a true messiah or another Stalin.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

67. “I know as a writer how valuable a tool is the wastebasket. Perhaps God throws away many experiments before He finds the right expression. Perhaps we are the discards – or we could be the part He keeps. This mystery is what keeps us all going, to see what happens in the next chapter.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

68. “There is no death. How can there be death if everything is part of the Godhead? The soul never dies and the body is never really alive.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

69. “No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

70. “When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

71. “It seems that the analysis of character is the highest human entertainment. And literature does it, unlike gossip, without mentioning names.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

72. “What’s the good of not believing? Today it’s your wife you don’t believe; tomorrow it’s God Himself you won’t take stock in.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

73. “I believe in God but people are liars. It’s those people who say they are appointed by God who I don’t believe in.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

74. “Shoulders are from God and burdens too.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

75. “Writing has power, but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind, but they can’t direct it. Time changes things, God changes things, the dictators change things, but writers can’t change anything.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

76. “There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

77. “In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

78. “In many ways, astrology, numerology and palmistry are corruptions of the occult because they have attempted to make a practice out of something that is essentially imaginative.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

79. “The New England conscience doesn’t keep you from doing what you shouldn’t – it just keeps you from enjoying it.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

80. “When a human being kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

81. “There is a plan to this universe. There is a high intelligence, maybe even a purpose, but it’s given to us on the installment plan.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

82. “Whatever doesn’t really happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn’t happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

83. “God gave us so many emotions, and so many strong ones. Every human being, even if he is an idiot, is a millionaire in emotions.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

84. “We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

85. “Actually, the true story of a person’s life can never be written. It is beyond the power of literature. The full tale of any life would be both utterly boring and utterly unbelievable.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

86. “God is a writer and we are both the heroes and the readers.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

87. “That glimmer of light, surrounded by so many shadows, seemed to say without words: Evil has not yet taken complete dominion. A spark of hope is still left.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

88. “The pessimism of the creative person is not decadence but a mighty passion for the redemption of man.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

89. “Literature has neglected the old and their emotions. The novelists never told us that in love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

90. “Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

91. “It is a general rule that when the grain of truth cannot be found, men will swallow great helpings of falsehood.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

92. “I am not ashamed to admit that I belong to those who fantasize that literature is capable of bringing new horizons and new perspectives – philosophical, religious, aesthetical and even social.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

93. “We write not only for children but also for their parents. They, too, are serious children.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

94. “I am thankful, of course, for the prize and thankful to God for each story, each idea, each word, each day.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

95. “There must be a way for man to attain all possible pleasures, all the powers and knowledge that nature can grant him, and still serve God – a God who speaks in deeds, not in words, and whose vocabulary is the Cosmos.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

96. “When literature becomes overly erudite, it means that interest in the art has gone and curiosity about the artist is what’s important. It becomes a kind of idolatry.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

97. “The characters have their own lives and their own logic, and you have to act accordingly.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

98. “All is foreseen but the choice is given.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

99. “There is great treasure there behind our skull and this is true about all of us. This little treasure has great, great powers, and I would say we only have learnt a very, very small part of what it can do.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

100. “In the half darkness I winked to my other self, my mad dictator, and congratulated him on his droll victory. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth flowing from Shosha’s head to my face. What did I have to lose? Nothing more than what everyone loses anyway.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer