Isaac Leib Peretz quotes

Isaac Leib Peretz was a Polish-Jewish writer, playwright, and one of the leading figures of modern Yiddish literature. His works highlighted the struggles, dreams, and spiritual yearnings of Eastern European Jews. He played a crucial role in shaping Jewish cultural identity through both his writings and support for emerging literary voices. Here are 65 of his quotes:

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

Isaac Leib Peretz

A people's memory is history; and as a man without a memory, so a people without a history cannot grow wiser, better.

Isaac Leib Peretz

In the second and third exiles we have served as a living protest against greed and hate, against physical force, against "might makes right!"

Isaac Leib Peretz

Prayer sometimes dulls the hunger of the pauper, like a mother's finger thrust into the mouth of her starving baby.

Isaac Leib Peretz

Ugliness is the greatest of all sins.

Isaac Leib Peretz

A heap of bricks is not yet a house.

Isaac Leib Peretz

We take a drink only for the sake of the benediction.

Isaac Leib Peretz

[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.

Isaac Leib Peretz

Youth is fair, a graceful stag, Leaping, playing in a park. Age is gray, a toothless hag, Stumbling in the dark.

Isaac Leib Peretz

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

Isaac Leib Peretz

If the husband sits on a chair in the Garden of Eden, his wife is his footstool.

Isaac Leib Peretz

Many refined people will not kill a fly, but eat an ox.

Isaac Leib Peretz

In this world it is very dangerous to be weak.

Isaac Leib Peretz

[About Jews] Among other nations, the vital problems are: a good crop, extension of the boundaries, strong armies, colonies; among us, if we wish to be true to ourselves, the vital questions are: conscience, freedom, culture, ethics.

Isaac Leib Peretz

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

Isaac Leib Peretz

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.

Isaac Leib Peretz

The worst dog gets the best bone.

Isaac Leib Peretz

Prosperity may be found in small as in big business.

Isaac Leib Peretz

At the Throne of Glory it is not the nobly-born that are beloved, but the nobly-risen.

Isaac Leib Peretz

[About Jews] Sheer egotism compels us to the purest love of mankind as a whole.... Our hearts are like a sponge, receptive to all the newest humanitarian ideas; and our sympathy goes out to all the unfortunate, all the oppressed.

Isaac Leib Peretz

We are more than a people.... We are of a pure blood.

Isaac Leib Peretz

In the hands of the Jew, the reddest of all flags has been placed forcibly, and he has been told: "Go, go on and on, with all the liberators, with all fighters for a better tomorrow, with all destroyers of Sodoms. But never may you rest with them.... Pay everywhere the bloodiest costs of liberation, but be unnamed in all emancipation proclamations, or be rarely and scarcely mentioned."... The people cursed and blessed to be the last of the redeemed, to be eternally bleeding, the highest soaring expression of the divine in life.

Isaac Leib Peretz