The Promise Quotes

“It's always easier to learn something than to use what you've learned. . . . You're alone when you're learning. But you always use it on other people. It's different when there are other people involved.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“A choice tells the world what is most important to a human being. When a man has a choice to make he chooses what is most important to him, and that choice tells the world what kind of a man he is.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“It is strange how ideas can float about and be ignored until they are put into a book. A book can be a weapon...”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“I held it close to my face and smelled the ink. I have always loved the smell of ink in a new book.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“He became angry. “It should read ‘those who fear ideas,’ not ‘those who fear God.’ There are times when those who fear God make themselves very unpleasant as human beings.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“You don't want to make mistakes with people. Sometimes when you make a mistake you lose a human soul.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“One derives great moral strength from a cup of coffee," I said.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“Each generation thinks it fights new battles. But the battles are the same. Only the people are different.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“When the alternative is possible disaster, a man must gamble.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“A man must be forced to choose. It is only when you are forced to choose that you know what is important to you.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“If everybody who had brains and doubts left Orthodoxy, we would be in a great deal of trouble.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“We become like dead branches and last year's leaves and what the hell good are we for ourselves and the world in a mental ghetto.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“Williamsburg was stifling, narcotized by the heat.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“It's always easier to learn something than to use what you've learned.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“They become angry and ugly and they fight anything that's a threat to them. We have to learn how to fight back without hurting them too much.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“We will have many fights. But they will be for the sake of Torah.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“Perhaps. But it is childish to think of what might have been.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“When your world is destroyed and only a remnant is saved, then whatever is seen as a threat to that remnant becomes a hated enemy.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“There are times when those who fear God make themselves very unpleasant as human beings.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“Take care of your father," he said. "There aren't many people like him around anymore.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“It's only a book. But what it means to write a book.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“He's not asking me to make a choice. He's telling me to take a stand. I'm either with him or against him. All or nothing. I'm disgusted with the whole business. I don't want smicha if the price I have to pay for it is to stop thinking.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“The Master of the Universe has so created the world that everything that can be good can also be evil. It is mankind that makes a thing good or evil, Reuven, depending upon how we use the wonders we have been given.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“I gambled that there was enough strength and depth in the tradition for me to be able to make it into more than Sunday-school Bible stories. I had no stomach for fundamentalism. I wanted American Judaism to become something an intelligent person would have to take seriously and be unable to laugh at and want to love.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“There’s a rabbi in the Talmud who even says there’s no atonement for lashon hara.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“It's my world, best friend. And I haven't seen anything outside that's better.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“A man must sometimes be forced to make choices, for it is only by his choices that we know what a man truly is.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“How do I convince him that the way we study Talmud is not a threat?'

'But it is a threat, Reuven. I just told you it is a threat. In the hands of those who do not love the tradition it is a dangerous weapon.'

'Everything is dangerous in the wrong hands. How do I convince him that we're not a threat?”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“Verbal fraud is worse than monetary fraud.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“There was a grimness about him, a wall of stiff, humorless rigidity, an unbending quality of mind that placed everything it came into contact with into immediate and fixed categories of approval or disapproval where I knew they would remain forever.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise