Quotes from Isaac Bashevis Singer

If Moses had been paid newspaper rates for the Ten Commandments, he might have written the Two Thousand Commandments.

The sexual organs are the most sensitive organs of the human being. They are not diplomats. They tell the truth.

There is great treasure there behind our skull and this is true about all of us. This little treasure has great, great powers, and I would say we only have learnt a very, very small part of what it can do.

If you believe in God, then He exists.

Shoulders are from God, and burdens too.

When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren't told or books weren't written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day. The whole world, all human life, is one long story.

But what about the creatures whose flesh he's carrying there? A few days ago they were alive. They too have souls. They too are God's children. They were quite possibly made of better material than human beings. Since they were sinless, they were certainly more innocent. But day after day they are ritually sacrificed-angels in the shape of oxen, calves, sheep. I once wanted to become a vegetarian. I wanted everything-and I never got further than wanting.

In the half darkness I winked to my other self, my mad dictator, and congratulated him on his droll victory. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth flowing from Shosha's head to my face. What did I have to lose? Nothing more than what everyone loses anyway.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

If you hear I'm dead, don't come to my funeral.

Even the worm that crawls in the Earth there glows a divine spark. When you slaughter a creature, you slaughter your God.

Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.

Dictatorships, wars, and cruelty drive whole countries to madness. My theory is that the human species was crazy from the very first and that civilization and culture are only enhancing man's insanity. A Tale of Two Sisters

To be a vegetarian is to disagree — to disagree with the course of things today. Starvation, world hunger, cruelty, waste, wars — we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one.

What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.

The dead don't go anywhere. They're all here. Each man is a cemetery. An actual cemetery, in which lie all our grandmothers and grandfathers, the father and mother, the wife, the child. Everyone is here all the time.

One thing I found out then was that pity is a form of love and, actually, its highest expression. A Tale of Two Sisters

Children don t read to find their identity to free themselves from guilt to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology.... They still believe in God the family angels devils witches goblins logic clarity punctuation and other such obsolete stuff.... When a book is boring they yawn openly. They don t expect their writer to redeem humanity but leave to adults such childish illusions.

all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka

But my gloom did not lessen. I knew that I'd had a bad dream, and I stood in the dark trying to recollect it. The second I closed my eyes, I was with the dead. They did things words cannot express. They spoke madness. (Hanka)

literature can very well describe the absurd, but it should never become absurd itself

Kindness, Ive discovered, is everything in life

Along with the atom, the personality of the Homo Sapiens has been splitting...

Those who understand the complexities of human nature know that joy and pain, ugliness and beauty, love and hate, mercy and cruelty and other conflicting emotions often blend and cannot be separated from each other.