30 Quotes by Leon Wieseltier

In flight from intellectual heaviness, [he] arrives at intelligent weightlessness. Every notion is flipped this way and that; the answer to every question is yes and no; the proliferating examples from all the arts...overwhelm the observations that they are designed to illustrate; the general impression in one of uncontrollable articulateness. [He] does not think his thoughts; he convenes them. There is not a sign of struggle anywhere.

It is never long before identity is reduced to loyalty.

The questions that we must ask ourselves, and that our historians and our children will ask of us, are these: How will what we create compare with what we inherited? Will we add to our tradition or will we subtract from it? Will we enrich it or will we deplete it?

But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight — matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.

The doctrine of "exit strategy" fundamentally misunderstands the nature of war and, more generally, the nature of historical action. for the knowledge of the end is not given to us at the beginning.

Suferință, hrănește-mă!

Lumea este susținută de rostirea cuvintelor.

What matters to me is that one identifies one's genuine obsessions, one's genuine commitments, one's genuine appetites, one pursues them seriously and far.

There are moral religious people and moral secular people, immoral religious people and immoral secular people.