Quotes from Leon Wieseltier

Use the new technologies for the old purposes.

I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?

The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone's drunk and ugly and they're going to pass out in a few minutes.

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.

No great deed, private or public, had ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.

A wall of books is a wall of windows.

No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.

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.

Suferin??, hr?ne?te-m?!

În ziua de fericire s? fim bucuroÈ™i È™i în ziua de nenorocire s? v?rs?m o lacrim?, c? exist? o vreme pentru a plânge È™i o vreme pentru a jeli.

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?

Vrea s? muÈ™te din fructul amar, dar f?r? s?-i guste am?reala. S? lucrezi în lume, dar s? nu simÈ›i nici un fel de dragoste pentru lume.

Datoria ... o pasiune f?r? bucurie.

Lumea este sus?inut? de rostirea cuvintelor.

I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?

Nahmanides appreciates that an acquaintance with death can ruin an appetite for life. And so he seeks to secure the mourner against such ruin—to describe an ideal of mourning that is not despair, that honors the encounter with death but does not succumb to it.

I found a rip in my phylacteries. Hath heaven no more thunderbolts?

It is never long before identity is reduced to loyalty.

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.