“If those papers had been in my pocket I would have never lived to be seventy. I have led a strange life, a set of complete coincidences.”

—  Abraham Pais

On the fate of his friend Lion Nordheim, who was executed ten days before the end of the war, and his own release at around the same time, p. 52
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
Context: On the day we were caught, Lion and I had been talking about writing a memorandum on the fate of the Jewish war children living in hiding or among Dutch families … we were the representatives of the Zionist youth organization. … Lion who had been taking notes of the discussion, put these papers in his jacket pocket when he took a break from lunch. When the Germans caught us they discovered his notes. If those papers had been in my pocket I would have never lived to be seventy. I have led a strange life, a set of complete coincidences.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If those papers had been in my pocket I would have never lived to be seventy. I have led a strange life, a set of compl…" by Abraham Pais?
Abraham Pais photo
Abraham Pais 19
American Physicist 1918–2000

Related quotes

Theodore Roosevelt photo

“I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life; I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Address in Des Moines, Iowa (4 November 1910)
1910s

Richard Wright photo

“But full emotional and intellectual belief never came. Perhaps if I had caught my first sense of life from the church I would have been moved to complete acceptance, but the hymns and sermons of God came into my heart only long after my personality had been shaped and formed by uncharted conditions of life. I felt that I had in me a sense of living as deep as that which the church was trying to give me, and in the end I remained basically unaffected.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

John Lennon photo

“I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pockets. When I have enough, I have a book.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter
Leonard Cohen photo

“I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work — just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

Interview with BBC Radio 1FM (1994)

B.K.S. Iyengar photo

“Yoga was my Destiny, and for the past seventy years, yoga has been my life, a life fused with the practice, philosophy, and teaching of the art of yoga. Like all destinies, like all great adventures, I have gone to places I have imagined before I set out. For me It has been a journey of discovery.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.xi

Emil M. Cioran photo

“All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Charles Kingsley photo

“I have fought my fight, I have lived my life,
I have drunk my share of wine;
From Trier to Köln there was never a knight
Had a merrier life than mine.”

Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) English clergyman, historian and novelist

Quoted in Albert Jay Nock's Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943), p. 54.
Attributed

Nicholas Sparks photo

“If we'd never met, I think I would have known my life wasn't complete. And I would have wandered the world in search of you, even if I didn't know who I was looking for”

Nicholas Sparks book The Longest Ride

Variant: If we'd never met, I think I would have known my life wasn't complete. And I would have wandered the world in search of you, even if I didn't know who I was looking for.
Source: The Longest Ride

Henry David Thoreau photo

“My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

My Life Has Been a Poem I Would Have Writ
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Friday

Paul Krugman photo

“What I believe is that the age of creative silliness is not past. Virtue, as an economic theorist, does not consist in squeezing the last drop of blood out of assumptions that have come to seem natural because they have been used in a few hundred earlier papers. If a new set of assumptions seems to yield a valuable set of insights, then never mind if they seem strange.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

How I Work (1993)

Related topics