198 Quotes by Chaim Potok

Virtuosity in Talmud was the achievement most sought after by every student of a yeshiva, for it was the automatic guarantee of a reputation for brilliance.

I hated what I had drawn in that sketchbook. I should not have done it. Why had he asked me to do it? I hated the drawings. They were lies, stagnant creations done to someone else’s demand, and I despised them.

As you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them – “ordinary things” is a better expression. That is the way the world is.

Like the French frontier police who thought that some of Picasso’s Cubist drawings were plans of the country’s defenses.

Those mornings, the beach was my synagogue and the waves and gulls were audience to my prayers. I stood on the beach and felt wind-blown sprays of ocean on my face, and I prayed. And sometimes the words seemed more appropriate to this beach than to the synagogue on my street.

Truth has to be given in riddles. People can’t take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.

About accidents we do not have many choices. Our job is to make better the world God gave us. We are partners with God. One day you will understand. We have to work hard to make it a good world. But it is not an impossible job.

The span of a man’s life – that is nothing. But what a man makes of that span – that is something. A man must make his own meaning for life. Meaning is not automatically given to life.

Disorder and frequent sorrow the mulch for creativity.