Kressel Housman > Kressel's Quotes

“Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example. Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason and that reason alone do we have to suffer now. We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English, or representatives of any country for that matter; we will always remain Jews, but we want to, too.”
― Anne Frank

“Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories. ”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“And anyway, it’s not as though I’ll never see Mum again, is it?”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

“I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me. I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear; my courage is reborn. But, and that is the great question, will I ever be able to write anything great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?”
― Anne Frank

“I saw that "success," "failure," "poverty", "riches," were price tags, money values of the market place which had mesmerized and sidetracked me for years.”
― Anzia Yezierska

“If there are words and wrongs like knives, whose deep inflicted lacerations never heal - cutting injuries and insults of serrated and poison-dripping edge - so, too, there are consolations of tone too fine for the ear not fondly and for ever to retain their echo: caressing kindnesses - loved, lingered over through a whole life, recalled with unfaded tenderness, and answering the call with undimmed shine, out of that raven cloud foreshadowing Death himself.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Villette

“What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited sketches, full of variety and glow? How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour?”
― Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters

“When Pharoah restored the chief butler to his position as foretold by Joseph in his interpretation of the butler's dream, he forgot Joseph. "Yet the chief butler did not remember Joseph but forgot him." (Genesis 40:23). Why does the Bible use this repetitive language? It is obvious that if the butler forgot Joseph, he did not remember him. Yet both verbs are used, "not remembering" and "forgetting." The Bible, in using this language, is teaching us a very important lesson. There are events of such overbearing magnitude that one ought not to remember them all the time, but one must not forget them either. Such an event is the Holocaust.”
― Israel Spira

“If you are not sensitive to rejection, doesn't that also mean you're indifferent to love?”
― Wendy Shalit, A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue

“All these guys picking on smart kids and calling them geeks and dweebs are going to grow up and want to know why they don't do something about the terrible state the world is in. I can tell you why. By the time they grow up, most of the kids who realy could have changed things are wrecked. ”
― Bruce Coville, My Teacher Glows in the Dark

“I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.”
― Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery

“The only two useful art forms are religion and stories.”
― Stephen King, The Body

“I think it [religion] is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communion all the other arts attempt.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a G-d, but never without belief in a devil. Usually, the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.”
― Eric Hoffer

“Love was the most interesting place to go, and beauty was the ticket.”
― Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

“Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional than the unashamed misfit.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School

“In college, there is no time to commune with one's thoughts. One goes to college to learn, it seems, not to think. When one enters the portals of learning, one leaves the dearest pleasures–solitude, books and imagination–outside with the whispering pines. I suppose I ought to find some comfort in the thought that I am laying up treasures for future enjoyment, but I am improvident enough to prefer present joy to hoarding riches against a rainy day.”
― Helen Keller

“We are not teaching to the test; we are living to it.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“In college, books assigned for class were read as competitive sport - the more critically, the better.”
― Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

“The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates

“A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilisation.”
― Samuel Johnson

“If love were the only thing, I
would follow you—in rags, if need be—to the world's end; for you hold
my heart in the hollow of your hand! But is love the only thing?
"I know people write and talk as if it were. Perhaps, for some, Fate lets
it be. Ah, if I were one of them! But if love had been the only thing, you
would have let the King die in his cell.
Honour binds a woman too, Rudolf. My honour lies in being true to
my country and my House. I don't know why God has let me love you;
but I know that I must stay.”
― Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda

“If wisdom’s ways you wisely seek,
Five things observe with care,
To whom you speak,
Of whom you speak,
And how, and when, and where.”
― Caroline Lake Ingalls

“Real problems sooner or later are resolved; on the contrary, pseudoproblems are not.”
― Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve

“We can only feel sorry for ourselves when our misfortunes are still supportable. Once this limit is crossed, the only way to bear the unbearable is to laugh at it.”
― Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“The mistakes of history bring relentless reprisals.”
― Pearl S. Buck, Living Reed: A Novel of Korea

“Wang Lung sat smoking, thinking of the silver as it had lain upon the table. It had come out of the earth, this silver, out of the earth that he ploughed and turned and spent himself upon. He took his life from the earth; drop by drop by his sweat he wrung food from it and from the food, silver. Each time before this that he had taken the silver out to give to anyone, it had been like taking a piece of his life and giving it to someone carelessly. But not for the first time, such giving was not pain. He saw, not the silver in the alien hand of a merchant in the town; he saw the silver transmuted into something worth even more than life itself - clothes upon the body of his son.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth