Top 26 Quotes & Sayings by I. L. Peretz

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an author I. L. Peretz.

Last updated on December 18, 2024.

Isaac Leib Peretz, also sometimes written Yitskhok Leybush Peretz was a Yiddish language author and playwright from Poland. Payson R. Stevens, Charles M. Levine, and Sol Steinmetz count him with Mendele Mokher Seforim and Sholem Aleichem as one of the three great classical Yiddish writers. Sol Liptzin wrote: "Yitzkhok Leibush Peretz was the great awakener of Yiddish-speaking Jewry and Sholom Aleichem its comforter.... Peretz aroused in his readers the will for self-emancipation, the will for resistance against the many humiliations to which they were being subjected."

Author | May 18, 1852 - April 3, 1915

Source: Wikipedia

Ugliness is the greatest of all sins.

I. L. Peretz

It is not only individuals peoples too cannot live merely for themselves. The whole world must be redeemed.

I. L. Peretz

Purim is the birthday of the first Schutz-Jude , the first Jewish toady to foreign royalty.

I. L. Peretz

[About Jews] By nature we are like all other human beings, yet our people is unlike others, because our life is different, our history is different, our teacher is the Exile.

I. L. Peretz

In this world it is very dangerous to be weak.

I. L. Peretz

We take a drink only for the sake of the benediction.

I. L. Peretz

Prosperity may be found in small as in big business.

I. L. Peretz

A stranger's rose is but a thorn.

I. L. Peretz

To be of the eternal, you must be of the earth.

I. L. Peretz

Youth is fair, a graceful stag, Leaping, playing in a park. Age is gray, a toothless hag, Stumbling in the dark.

I. L. Peretz

At the Throne of Glory it is not the nobly-born that are beloved, but the nobly-risen.

I. L. Peretz

A heap of bricks is not yet a house.

I. L. Peretz

[About Jews] Among other nations, the vital problems are: a good crop, extension of the boundaries, strong armies, colonies; among us, if we wish to be true to ourselves, the vital questions are: conscience, freedom, culture, ethics.

I. L. Peretz

Many refined people will not kill a fly, but eat an ox.

I. L. Peretz

Prayer sometimes dulls the hunger of the pauper, like a mother's finger thrust into the mouth of her starving baby.

I. L. Peretz

Don't look up to heaven, for what will you see in the sky, except stars, luminous but cold, wholly insensitive to pity?

I. L. Peretz

[About Jews] Sheer egotism compels us to the purest love of mankind as a whole.... Our hearts are like a sponge, receptive to all the newest humanitarian ideas; and our sympathy goes out to all the unfortunate, all the oppressed.

I. L. Peretz

Yiddish, the language which will ever bear witness to the violence and murder inflicted on us, bear the marks of our expulsions from land to land, the language which absorbed the wails of the fathers, the laments of the generations, the poison and bitterness of history, the language whose precious jewels are the undried, uncongealed Jewish tears.

I. L. Peretz

The worst dog gets the best bone.

I. L. Peretz

A people's memory is history; and as a man without a memory, so a people without a history cannot grow wiser, better.

I. L. Peretz

If the husband sits on a chair in the Garden of Eden, his wife is his footstool.

I. L. Peretz

A letter depends on how you read it, a melody on how you sing it.

I. L. Peretz

Time is change, transformation, evolution.

I. L. Peretz

The Hebrew language... is the only glue which holds together our scattered bones. It also holds together the rings in the chain of time.... It binds us to those who built pyramids, to those who shed their blood on the ramparts of Jerusalem, and to those who, at the burning stakes, cried Shema Yisrael!

I. L. Peretz

[About the diaspora] Canaan is too small for God's children. The Land of Israel will spread through all lands!

I. L. Peretz

In the second and third exiles we have served as a living protest against greed and hate, against physical force, against "might makes right"!

I. L. Peretz