Today’s One-Liner (#117)
The more man plans, the harder God laughs. –Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman, translated by Hillel Halkin
Category: Jewish Tradition
Today’s One-Liner (#115)
There are three crowns: the crown of learning, the crown of priesthood, and the crown of royalty; but the crown of a good name excels them all. –R. Simeon, in Joseph Hertz, Sayings of the…
Today’s One-Liner (#114)
Nothing is more dangerous, either for an individual, or for a people, than to confess to sins of which one is innocent. –Ahad Ha’am, quoted in David Mamet, The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the…
A Poet’s Life
Yankev Glatshteyn worked in over fifty sweatshops. –Janet Hadda, Yankev Glatshteyn
Today’s One-Liner (#91)
It is not in our power to explain either the prosperity of the wicked or the afflictions of the righteous. –R. Yannai, in Joseph Hertz, Sayings of the Fathers
Today’s One-Liner (#85)
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. –Koheleth, 1:9, King James…
Today’s One-Liner (#84)
Make the impossible possible, the possible easy, the easy elegant. –Moshe Feldenkrais
Maniacal Obstinacy
I often wonder whether I have in me a single gene or drop off blood inherited from my biblical ancestors, or even from the ghettos of the old Spanish and German cities. Who knows, perhaps…
Genres
[Alexander Kluge’s two books] are sobering inventories of a catastrophe, cool, dry and therefore more gripping. A card index of all imaginable inhumanities. Kluge’s books consist of excerpts from diaries, telegrams, official reports, sermons of…
Soul-Power
A healthy ego is transformed into a soul only via the burden of another who must impinge on the ego, causing the ego to shrink, as it were. –Ira F. Stone, A Responsible Life: The…