33 Quotes by Shmuel Yosef Agnon

If we eat any food, or drink any beverage, we must recite a blessing over them before and after.

As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile.

But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem.

Not every man remembers the name of the cow which supplied him with each drop of milk he has drunk.

Our sages of blessed memory have said that we must not enjoy any pleasure in this world without reciting a blessing.

At the age of nineteen and a half, I went to the Land of Israel to till its soil and live by the labour of my hands. As I did not find work, I sought my livelihood elsewhere.

The fate of the singers who, like my songs, went up in flame was also the fate of the books which I later wrote. All of them went up in flame to Heaven in a fire which broke out one night at my home in Bad Homburg as I lay ill in a hospital.

I was five years old when I wrote my first song. It was out of longing for my father that I wrote it.

After all my possessions had been burned, God gave me the wisdom to return to Jerusalem.