Itzhak Peretz Quotes

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.

If the husband sits on a chair in the Garden of Eden, his wife is his footstool.

[About the diaspora] Canaan is too small for God's children. The Land of Israel will spread through all lands!

Not all Hasidim are hasidim.

Little houses in a row,
Down a quiet lane;
Neither doors nor windows know,
Peace and darkness reign.
Though you cannot pay the rent,
You will dwell there with the best.
Where the weary, broken, spent,
Find eternal rest!

Children... constitute man's eternity.

The soul is imprisoned in the body, and the Lord... built two windows in the wall of the prison... Unfortunately, the windows have curtains—eyelids; and a man whose soul is impure, feeling himself scrutinized, lets down the curtains and conceals the soul.

We take a drink only for the sake of the benediction.

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.

The bigger the merchant the smaller the Jew.

Jews are likened to sand: tiny grains, dry and scattered, each separate from the other.

Der Dichter, 1910. Alle Verk, x. 11; S. Liptzin. Peretz. Yivo, 1947, p. 310.

"For the commandment is a lamp" [Prov. 6.23]. And the spark which kindles the commandment is devotion.

Purim is the birthday of the first Schutz-Jude, the first Jewish toady to foreign royalty.

You are the weakest and the least, and the last to be redeemed.... You will be freed, when man will rise above the earthly, when human worms will turn into human eagles.