Isaac Leib Peretz (1852 – 1915)
Polish-born author and poet who is counted among the three great classical writers in the Yiddish language.
A people's memory is history; and as a man without a memory, so a people without a history cannot grow wiser, better.
Nobody ever stubs his toe against a mountain. It's the little temptations that bring a man down.
The voice is on the borderline between the physical and the spiritual.
Many refined people will not kill a fly, but eat an ox.
The Hebrew language... is the only glue which holds together our scattered bones. It also holds together the rings in the chain of time.... It binds us to those who built pyramids, to those who shed their blood on the ramparts of Jerusalem, and to those who, at the burning stakes, cried Shema Yisrael!
With the same bricks one may erect... a palace or a prison.... The same letters are used in Holy Writ and heretical works.
I fear you. As victors, you may become the bureaucracy: doling out to each his bit as in a poorhouse, assigning to each his task as in a prison. And you will exterminate the creator of new worlds,—the free human will, and stop up the purest well of human happiness—the power of the one to face thousands, to stand up to peoples and generations.
Man has been likened to an earthen pot.... You have but to tap the pot with your finger. If it rings back full and true, all is well; there is your perfect pot. And if not—man, alas, has been likened to a broken potsherd.
Prayer sometimes dulls the hunger of the pauper, like a mother's finger thrust into the mouth of her starving baby.
Prosperity may be found in small as in big business.
Purim is the birthday of the first Schutz-Jude, the first Jewish toady to foreign royalty.
Children... constitute man's eternity.
I am a rainworm, buried deep
Among the oozing, slimy things,
Yet of an eagle's nest I dream,
And eagle's wings.
If the husband sits on a chair in the Garden of Eden, his wife is his footstool.
[About Jews] Sheer egotism compels us to the purest love of mankind as a whole.... Our hearts are like a sponge, receptive to all the newest humanitarian ideas; and our sympathy goes out to all the unfortunate, all the oppressed.
We are more than a people.... We are of a pure blood.
Not all Hasidim are hasidim.
"For the commandment is a lamp" [Prov. 6.23]. And the spark which kindles the commandment is devotion.