A wise man hears one word and understands two.
If you want your dreams to come true, don't oversleep.
He who cannot endure the bad will not live to see the good.
True poverty does not come from God.
If they want to see me, here I am. If they want to see my clothes, open my closet and show them my suits.
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.
Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.
Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.
When one must, one can.
if you don't want to get old, don't mellow.
My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.
I am determined to give the Yiddish language a fighting chance to survive.
Well, I like how people talk. I like language. You know, Linda Richman spoke in Yiddish.
I heard Yiddish when my father's family came to the house, which was as seldom as my mother could arrange it.
There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love... In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of a frightened and hopeful humanity.
The truth is that what the great religions preached, the Yiddish-speaking people of the ghettos practiced day in and day out. They were the people of The Book in the truest sense of the word. They knew of no greater joy than the study of man and human relations, which they called Torah, Talmud, Mussar, Cabala.
Singing in Yiddish was a great thrill for me and came about through Joe Papp, the founder of The Public Theater.
I'm Italian, but some people think I'm Jewish because I work the Yiddish. I also work the Italian, by the way.
I realised a long time ago that instrumental music speaks a lot more clearly than English, Spanish, Yiddish, Swahili, any other language. Pure melody goes outside time.
or simply:
