Isaac Leib Peretz (1852 – 1915)
Polish-born author and poet who is counted among the three great classical writers in the Yiddish language.
A stranger's rose is but a thorn.
The bigger the merchant the smaller the Jew.
Yiddish, the language which will ever bear witness to the violence and murder inflicted on us, bear the marks of our expulsions from land to land, the language which absorbed the wails of the fathers, the laments of the generations, the poison and bitterness of history, the language whose precious jewels are the undried, uncongealed Jewish tears.
The worst dog gets the best bone.
Who tells the truth needs no fancy phrases.
[About loyalty to Judaism] Don't assume, Jewish intellectuals, that you are doing your duty by working... for so-called Humanity.... You are lighting a fire beneath the open sky, while your own family in your own house is freezing.
A Jew waits for Messiah to come and redeem the world from fear and pain, from the cataclysmic conflicts between rich and poor. All shall enjoy the earth. This means, in popular imagination, that bread and clothes shall grow, ready-made, on trees. Do you have more winged ideals?
According to the generation is the music thereof.
We become more united in exile than in Palestine.
Human lips are now forbidden to utter His name, for being the only God, He needs no name.
In this world it is very dangerous to be weak.
He who provides life provides also a living.
Ugliness is the greatest of all sins.
In the hands of the Jew, the reddest of all flags has been placed forcibly, and he has been told: "Go, go on and on, with all the liberators, with all fighters for a better tomorrow, with all destroyers of Sodoms. But never may you rest with them.... Pay everywhere the bloodiest costs of liberation, but be unnamed in all emancipation proclamations, or be rarely and scarcely mentioned."... The people cursed and blessed to be the last of the redeemed, to be eternally bleeding, the highest soaring expression of the divine in life.
It is not only individuals—peoples too cannot live merely for themselves. The whole world must be redeemed.
We are like fish
In this vast sea.
And Satan fishes
For you and me.
There are melodies that must have words... and melodies that sing themselves without words. The latter are of a higher grade. But these, too, depend on a voice and lips,... hence are not yet altogether pure, not yet genuine spirit. Genuine melody sings itself without a voice. It sings inside, within the heart, in man's very entrails!
They are all so-called Christian nations, but... this superimposed religion... does not penetrate into the core of their souls. It has no relation to their daily experience... It is a key to open a heaven after death and not a key with which to force open the portals of this life.