Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes (39 quotes)

Isaac Bashevis Singer: 39 quotes56 likes

Famous Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes

“In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

“When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

TIME (18 July 1983)

“To be a vegetarian is to disagree — to disagree with the course of things today. Starvation, world hunger, cruelty, waste, wars — we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it’s a strong one.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Preface to Food for the Spirit: Vegetarianism and the World Religions by Steven Rosen (New York: Bala Books, 1987, )
Variant: To be a vegetarian is to disagree - to disagree with the course of things today... starvation, cruelty - we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one.
Context: Vegetarianism is my religion. I became a consistent vegetarian some twenty-three years ago. Before that, I would try over and over again. But it was sporadic. Finally, in the mid-1960s, I made up my mind. And I've been a vegetarian ever since. When a human kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why should man then expect mercy from God? It's unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give. … This is my protest against the conduct of the world. To be a vegetarian is to disagree — to disagree with the course of things today. Nuclear power, starvation, cruelty — we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one.

“We all play chess with Fate as partner. He makes a move, we make a move. He tries to checkmate us in three moves, we try to prevent it. We know we can't win, but we're driven to give him a good fight.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Source: The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

“Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it’s dark”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Source: Teibele And Her Demon

“Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology… They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff… When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Nobel lecture as quoted in The Observer (17 December 1978) Variant: "They still believe in God, the family, angels, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other obsolete stuff."

Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes about God

“When a human kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why should man then expect mercy from God? It's unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give. It is inconsistent. I can never accept inconsistency or injustice. Even if it comes from God. If there would come a voice from God saying, "I'm against vegetarianism!" I would say, "Well, I am for it!" This is how strongly I feel in this regard.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

“I believe in God but people are liars. It's those people who say they are appointed by God who I don't believe in.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Source: The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

“Life is God's novel. Let him write it.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Quoted in Voices for Life (1975) edited by Dom Moraes

“I am thankful, of course, for the prize and thankful to God for each story, each idea, each word, each day.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

On winning the Nobel Prize, TIME magazine (16 October 1978)

“One can find in the Yiddish tongue and in the Yiddish spirit expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience and deep appreciation of human individuality. There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love. The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for Creation is still at the very beginning.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Nobel lecture (1978)

“Although I came to doubt all revelation, I can never accept the idea that the Universe is a physical or chemical accident, a result of blind evolution. Even though I learned to recognize the lies, the clichés and the idolatries of the human mind, I still cling to some truths which I think all of us might accept some day. There must be a way for man to attain all possible pleasures, all the powers and knowledge that nature can grant him, and still serve God — a God who speaks in deeds, not in words, and whose vocabulary is the Cosmos.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Nobel lecture (1978)

Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes about life

“Kindness, I’ve discovered, is everything in life.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

“I am not ashamed to admit that I belong to those who fantasize that literature is capable of bringing new horizons and new perspectives — philosophical, religious, aesthetical and even social. In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Nobel lecture (1978)

“A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise… Because that is how life is — full of surprises.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The New York Times (26 November 1978)

Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes

“We must believe in free will — we have no choice.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

An ironic statement which Singer made in many interviews over many years; here quoted in "Isaac Singer’s Promised City" http://www.city-journal.org/html/7_3_urbanities-isaac.html City Journal (Summer 1997) Variants or variant translations: We must believe in free will — we have no other choice. You must believe in free will; there is no choice. We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice. This makes more sense if you consider the statement "we must believe in free will; we have no [other logical] choice"

“Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The New York Times (3 December 1978)

“Not only has our generation lost faith in Providence but also in man himself, in his institutions and often in those who are nearest to him.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Nobel lecture (1978)
Context: Not only has our generation lost faith in Providence but also in man himself, in his institutions and often in those who are nearest to him. In their despair a number of those who no longer have confidence in the leadership of our society look up to the writer, the master of words. They hope against hope that the man of talent and sensitivity can perhaps rescue civilization. Maybe there is a spark of the prophet in the artist after all.

“The storyteller and poet of our time, as in any other time, must be an entertainer of the spirit in the full sense of the word, not just a preacher of social or political ideals. There is no paradise for bored readers and no excuse for tedious literature that does not intrigue the reader, uplift him, give him the joy and the escape that true art always grants.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Nobel lecture (1978)
Context: The storyteller and poet of our time, as in any other time, must be an entertainer of the spirit in the full sense of the word, not just a preacher of social or political ideals. There is no paradise for bored readers and no excuse for tedious literature that does not intrigue the reader, uplift him, give him the joy and the escape that true art always grants. Nevertheless, it is also true that the serious writer of our time must be deeply concerned about the problems of his generation. He cannot but see that the power of religion, especially belief in revelation, is weaker today than it was in any other epoch in human history. More and more children grow up without faith in God, without belief in reward and punishment, in the immortality of the soul and even in the validity of ethics. The genuine writer cannot ignore the fact that the family is losing its spiritual foundation.

“I am a vegetarian for health reasons—the health of the chicken.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Singer was very devoted to the vegetarian cause and was frequently quoted as saying this statement, as reported in Judaism and Vegetarianism by Richard H. Schwartz (New York: Lantern Books, 2001, ISBN 1-930051-24-7), p. 177 https://books.google.it/books?id=zo5TqKQVcEgC&pg=PA177

“Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

“What a strange power there is in clothing.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

“A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

“As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

“I don't invent characters because the Almightly has already invented millions… Just like experts at fingerprints do not create fingerprints but learn how to read them.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The New York Times (26 November 1978)

“I have many times resigned myself to never finding a true way out. But a new hope always emerges telling me that it is not yet too late for all of us to take stock and make a decision. I was brought up to believe in free will.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Nobel lecture (1978)

“Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The New York Times (3 December 1978)

“The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The New York Times (26 November 1978)

“Even in love, people betray themselves. And when you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself. I would say a great part of human history is a history of self-betrayal and betrayal of others.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

" Isaac Bashevis Singer's Universe http://www.nytimes.com/1978/12/03/archives/isaac-bashevis-singers-universe-errors-and-betrayals.html" by Richard Burgin in The New York Times (3 December 1978)

“If Moses had been paid newspaper rates for the Ten Commandments, he might have written the Two Thousand Commandments.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The New York Times (30 June 1985)

“There are some who call Yiddish a dead language, but so was Hebrew called for two thousand years. It has been revived in our time in a most remarkable, almost miraculous way. Aramaic was certainly a dead language for centuries but then it brought to light the Zohar, a work of mysticism of sublime value.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Nobel lecture (1978)

“Take three quarts of duck's milk…”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

First words of a "recipe for high-priced cookies" in Stories for Children (1984)

“Strange as these words may sound I often play with the idea that when all the social theories collapse and wars and revolutions leave humanity in utter gloom, the poet — whom Plato banned from his Republic — may rise up to save us all.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Nobel lecture (1978)