Top 29 Quotes & Sayings by Yehuda Amichai

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Yehuda Amichai was an Israeli poet and author, one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew in modern times.

Israeli - Poet | May 3, 1924 - September 22, 2000

Source: Wikipedia

The world of religion isn't a logical world; that's why children like it. It's a world of worked-out fantasies, very similar to children's stories or fairy tales.

Yehuda Amichai

I was a very religious child - I went to synagogue at least once, sometimes twice, a day. And I remember my religiousness as good - I think religion is good for children, especially educated children, because it allows for imagination, a whole imaginative world apart from the practical world.

Yehuda Amichai

My poems are political in the deeper sense of the word. Political means to live in your time, to be a man of your time.

Yehuda Amichai

I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.

Yehuda Amichai

I think the end is endless. It's either a big black hole or a big white light or both together. But it's totally meaningless, because even if someone would explain it, I wouldn't understand it.

Yehuda Amichai

There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.

Yehuda Amichai

Every intelligent person, whether he's an artist or not - a mathematician, a doctor, a scientist - possesses a poetic way of seeing and describing the world.

Yehuda Amichai

I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

Yehuda Amichai

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

Yehuda Amichai

I’ve never been in those places where I’ve never been and never will be, I have no share in the infinity of light-years and dark-years, but the darkness is mine, and the light, and my time is my own.

Yehuda Amichai

A flock of sheep near the airport or a high voltage generator beside the orchard: these combinations open up my life like a wound, but they also heal it. That's why my feelings always come in twos.

Yehuda Amichai

Love is like a reservoir of kindness and pleasure, like silos and pools during a siege.

Yehuda Amichai

From the place where we are right, flowers will not grow in the spring.

Yehuda Amichai

Here (Jerusalem), tears do not weaken the eyes, they only polish and shine the hardness of faces like stone.

Yehuda Amichai

And I said to myself: That's true, hope needs to be like barbed wire to keep out despair, hope must be a mine field.

Yehuda Amichai

The memory of my father is wrapped up in white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day of work. Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits out of his hat, he drew love from his small body.

Yehuda Amichai

Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

Yehuda Amichai

I wanted to be calm, like a mound with all its cities destroyed, and tranquil, like a full cemetery.

Yehuda Amichai

Tonight I think again of many days that are sacrificed for one night of love. Of the waste and the fruit of the waste, of plenty and of fire. And how painlessly-time.

Yehuda Amichai

The phrase I like to use to describe my sense of time-a play on comparative literature - is comparative time.

Yehuda Amichai

God has pity on kindergarten children

Yehuda Amichai

Knowledge of peace passes from country to country, like children's games, which are so much alike, everywhere.

Yehuda Amichai

Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding.

Yehuda Amichai

The soul inside me is the last foreign language I'm learning.

Yehuda Amichai

Every intelligent person, whether hes an artist or not - a mathematician, a doctor, a scientist - possesses a poetic way of seeing and describing the world.

Yehuda Amichai

And as we stray further from love, we multiply the words. Had we remained together we could have become a silence.

Yehuda Amichai

Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.

Yehuda Amichai

What are you going to do now? You'll collect loves like stamps. You've got doubles and no one will trade with you. And you've got damaged ones.

Yehuda Amichai

It was not an adventure; it was my life.

Yehuda Amichai