The Chosen Quotes
"They drank tea from samovars, sipping it slowly through cubes of sugar held between their teeth."
"Virtuosity in Talmud was the achievement most sought after by every student of a yeshiva."
"You had practice in your own yard before. We want a few minutes."
"He had nursed our softball team along for two years."
"I never really had any personal contact with this kind of Jew before."
"I could see his teeth between his parted lips."
"The ball hit the finger section of my glove with an impact that numbed my hand."
"I heard the umpire scream 'Out!' and Sidney Goldberg ran over to help me to my feet."
"The ball game had ended shortly before six o'clock."
"No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate."
"If a person comes to apologize for having hurt you, you must listen and forgive him."
"The purpose of man is to make his life holy—every aspect of his life: eating, drinking, praying, sleeping."
"It is a tragedy your mother is not alive to—"
"Every act of his and every word he spoke was holy."
"Sometimes I get the feeling that's all we are—ants."
"I have an agreement with my father. I study my quota of Talmud every day, and he doesn’t care what I do the rest of the time."
"What do you want me to say? You want me to say I’m miserable? Okay, I’m miserable."
"If a person has a contribution to make, he must make it in public. If learning is not made public, it is a waste."
"Dreams are full of unexpressed fears and hopes, things that we never even think of consciously."
"We're blind about the most important thing in our lives, our own selves."
"What's inside us is the greatest mystery of all."
"A man can do whatever he wishes to test his son's knowledge. But there are other ways than the way of Reb Saunders."
"Great men are always difficult to understand."
"When we study Torah, then the Master of the Universe listens."
"We are commanded to sit in the light of the Presence! It is for this that we were created!"
"We are only half alive in this world! Only half alive!"
"To study Torah is not such a simple thing. Torah is a task for all day and all night."
"No one lives forever. My father led his people before me, and my grandfather before him, and my great-grandfather before him."
"My son is my most precious possession. I have nothing in the world compared to my son."
"Master of the Universe, you gave me a brilliant son, and I have thanked you for him a million times."
"The pain of raising children. So many troubles. So many troubles."
"It’s what I told you in the hospital. My father believes in silence."
"It is never pleasant to be a buffer, Reuven."
"Human beings do not live forever. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity."
"A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life."
"I am doing things I consider very important now. If I could not do these things, my life would have no value."
"Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity."
"You can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own."
"I felt myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it."
"It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it."
"It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn’t always talk. Sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it."
"You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it."
"A father can bring up a child any way he wishes. What a price to pay for a soul."
"It is a way of bringing up children. Silence."
"You can’t move in this field without a doctorate."
"You do not know yet what it is to be a friend."
"A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain."
"A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him."
"Better I should have had no son at all than to have a brilliant son who had no soul."
"He must take their pain from them and carry it on his own shoulders."
"A tzaddik must know how to suffer for his people."
"In June my Daniel and his good friend begin to go different ways."