Itzhak Peretz Quotes

Human lips are now forbidden to utter His name, for being the only God, He needs no name.

Who tells the truth needs no fancy phrases.

Don't look up to heaven, for what will you see in the sky, except stars, luminous but cold, wholly insensitive to pity?

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?

The voice is on the borderline between the physical and the spiritual.

[About Jews] By nature we are like all other human beings, yet our people is unlike others, because our life is different, our history is different, our teacher is the Exile.

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

It is not only individuals—peoples too cannot live merely for themselves. The whole world must be redeemed.

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

The worst dog gets the best bone.

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.

According to the generation is the music thereof.

A letter depends on how you read it, a melody on how you sing it.

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.

Children... constitute man's eternity.