Tag: Quotables

Illustrative things said by people other than me. Think of them as pieces of congealed wonder and wisdom.

IF YOU CAN’T EXPLAIN IT simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
— Albert Einstein

THE AX EXISTED FOR 1.4 million years before anyone thought to put a handle on it.”
— James Williams

I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT ‘bizarre’ means anymore.”
— Anthony Bourdain

It used to freak me out that I’d never see the back of my own head. Now that I’ve accepted it, I can move on to the house of mirrors.”
— Barbatus the Elder

If you can take the song out and it doesn’t leave a hole, then the song’s not necessary.”
— Stephen Sondheim, a”h

When we stand in awe, our lips do not demand speech, knowing that if we spoke, we would deprave ourselves. In such moments talk is an abomination. All we want is to pause, to be still, that the moment may last. … The meaning of the things we revere is overwhelming, and beyond the grasp of our understanding.”
— Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

… Cervantes compared translation to the other side of a tapestry. At best we see a rough outline of the pattern we know exists on the other side, but it lacks definition and is full of loose threads.”
— Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z”tl

Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit […] I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’; but I know that it makes us more profound.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche

… Each of us sits alone within the cell of our subjective awareness. Now and then we receive cryptic messages from the outside world. Only dimly comprehending what we are doing, we compose responses, which we slip under the door. In this way, we manage to survive, even though we never really know what the hell is happening.”
— John Horgan

Our relationship to Torah is not based on asserting its factual historicity — whether based on “proofs” or “assertion despite reason.” Instead, each individual’s connection to scripture is based on the premise that the biblical narrative reflects an authentic religious experience that envelops some sort of reality and expresses it in a narrative and poetic fashion.”
— Rabbi David Bigman, “Refracting History Through the Spiritual Experience of the Present”