Itzhak Peretz Quotes

To be of the eternal, you must be of the earth.

I am a rainworm, buried deep
Among the oozing, slimy things,
Yet of an eagle's nest I dream,
And eagle's wings.

One God, one Law, one people, and one land.

Children... constitute man's eternity.

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!

A stranger's rose is but a thorn.

Nobody ever stubs his toe against a mountain. It's the little temptations that bring a man down.

A heap of bricks is not yet a house.

In the second and third exiles we have served as a living protest against greed and hate, against physical force, against "might makes right"!

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.

Youth is fair, a graceful stag,
Leaping, playing in a park.
Age is gray, a toothless hag,
Stumbling in the dark.

At the Throne of Glory it is not the nobly-born that are beloved, but the nobly-risen.

Prayer sometimes dulls the hunger of the pauper, like a mother's finger thrust into the mouth of her starving baby.

The bigger the merchant the smaller the Jew.

Rather a stone, but to be alone!