Top 30 Yehuda Amichai Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “And as we stray further from love, we multiply the words. Had we remained together we could have become a silence.”

— Yehuda Amichai

2. “From the place where we are right, flowers will not grow in the spring.”

— Yehuda Amichai

3. “Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding.”

— Yehuda Amichai

4. “Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.”

— Yehuda Amichai

5. “Every intelligent person, whether hes an artist or not – a mathematician, a doctor, a scientist – possesses a poetic way of seeing and describing the world.”

— Yehuda Amichai

6. “I’ve often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.”

— Yehuda Amichai

7. “Tonight I think again of many days that are sacrificed for one night of love. Of the waste and the fruit of the waste, of plenty and of fire. And how painlessly-time.”

— Yehuda Amichai

8. “And what will you do now? You’ll collect loves Like stamps. You’ve got doubles and no one Will trade you and you have the damaged ones.”

— Yehuda Amichai

9. “The world of religion isn’t a logical world; that’s why children like it. It’s a world of worked-out fantasies, very similar to children’s stories or fairy tales.”

— Yehuda Amichai

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

10. “It was not an adventure; it was my life.”

— Yehuda Amichai

11. “The memory of my father is wrapped up in white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day of work. Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits out of his hat, he drew love from his small body.”

— Yehuda Amichai

12. “And I said to myself: That’s true, hope needs to be like barbed wire to keep out despair, hope must be a mine field.”

— Yehuda Amichai

13. “Yes, all of this is sorrow. But leave a little love burning always like the small bulb in the room of a sleeping baby that gives him a bit of security and quiet love though he doesn’t know what the light is or where it comes from.”

— Yehuda Amichai

14. “A flock of sheep near the airport or a high voltage generator beside the orchard: these combinations open up my life like a wound, but they also heal it. That’s why my feelings always come in twos.”

— Yehuda Amichai

15. “God has pity on kindergarten children.”

— Yehuda Amichai

16. “My poems are political in the deeper sense of the word. Political means to live in your time, to be a man of your time.”

— Yehuda Amichai

17. “Love is like a reservoir of kindness and pleasure, like silos and pools during a siege.”

— Yehuda Amichai

18. “I stroked your hair in a direction opposite to your journey.”

— Yehuda Amichai

19. “I wanted to be calm, like a mound with all its cities destroyed, and tranquil, like a full cemetery.”

— Yehuda Amichai

20. “I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.”

— Yehuda Amichai

21. “I think the end is endless. It’s either a big black hole or a big white light or both together. But it’s totally meaningless, because even if someone would explain it, I wouldn’t understand it.”

— Yehuda Amichai

22. “Knowledge of peace passes from country to country, like children’s games, which are so much alike, everywhere.”

— Yehuda Amichai

23. “The phrase I like to use to describe my sense of time-a play on comparative literature-is comparative time.”

— Yehuda Amichai

24. “There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.”

— Yehuda Amichai

25. “The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.”

— Yehuda Amichai

26. “I was a very religious child – I went to synagogue at least once, sometimes twice, a day. And I remember my religiousness as good – I think religion is good for children, especially educated children, because it allows for imagination, a whole imaginative world apart from the practical world.”

— Yehuda Amichai

27. “My love turns me like a salt sea, it seems, Into sweet drops of autumn’s first rain. I’m brought to you slowly as I fall. Take me in. For us there’s no angel who will come to redeem. For we are together. Each of us alone.”

— Yehuda Amichai

28. “Il diametro della bomba era di trenta centimetri e il diametro del suo raggio d’azione era di circa sette metri, con quattro morti e undici feriti... E non parliamo nemmeno del pianto degli orfani che si leva fino al trono di Dio e ben oltre, creando un creando un cerchio senza fine e senza Dio.”

— Yehuda Amichai

29. “I’ve never been in those places where I’ve never been and never will be, I have no share in the infinity of light-years and dark-years, but the darkness is mine, and the light, and my time is my own.”

— Yehuda Amichai

30. “Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.”

— Yehuda Amichai

31. “The echo of a great love is like the echo of a huge dog’s barking in an empty Jerusalem house marked for demolition.”

— Yehuda Amichai

32. “A Tourist On a great rock by the Jaffa Gate sat a golden girl from Scandinavia and oiled herself with suntan oil as if on the beach. I told her, don’t go into these alleys, a net of bachelors in heat is spread there, a snare of lechers. And further inside, in half-darkness, the groaning trousers of old men, and unholy lust in the guise of prayer and grief and seductive chatter in many languages. Once Hebrew was God’s slang in these streets, now I use it for holy desire.”

— Yehuda Amichai