Quotes by Israeli Authors

The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one's decision making at work and at home.
Daniel Kahneman
Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either.
Golda Meir
Miracles sometimes occur but one has to work terribly hard for them.
Chaim Weizmann
Can we today measure devotion to husband and children by our indifference to everything else?
Golda Meir
Whether women are better than men I cannot say - but I can say they are certainly no worse.
Golda Meir
The past is our very being.
David Ben-Gurion
Not being beautiful was the true blessing. ... Not being beautiful forced me to develop my inner resources. The pretty girl has a handicap to overcome.
Golda Meir
Show me a sensible person who likes himself or herself! I know myself too well to like what I see. I know but too well that I'm not what I'd like to be.
Golda Meir
We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs - we have no place to go.
Golda Meir
If you want your children to improve let them overhear the nice things you say about them to others.
Haim Ginott
Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never afford himself.
Golda Meir
Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you are aboard there is nothing you can do.
Golda Meir
I want to be able to live without a crowded calendar. I want to be able to read a book without feeling guilty or go to a concert when I like.
Golda Meir
I must govern the clock not be governed by it.
Golda Meir
We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs - we have no place to go.
Golda Meir
If you want your children to improve let them overhear the nice things you say about them to others.
Haim Ginott
Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never afford himself.
Golda Meir
Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you are aboard there is nothing you can do.
Golda Meir
I want to be able to live without a crowded calendar. I want to be able to read a book without feeling guilty or go to a concert when I like.
Golda Meir
I must govern the clock not be governed by it.
Golda Meir
Ask many of us who are disabled what we would like in life and you would be surprised how few would say 'Not to be disabled.' We accept our limitations.
Itzhak Perlman
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
Abba Eban
Don't be so humble. You're not that great.
Golda Meir
I can honestly say that I was never affected by the question of the success of an undertaking. If I felt it was the right thing to do I was for it regardless of the possible outcome.
Golda Meir
Not being beautiful was the true blessing. ... Not being beautiful forced me to develop my inner resources. The pretty girl has a handicap to overcome.
Golda Meir
In Israel in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
David Ben-Gurion
I believe devoutly in the Word. The Word can save all destroy all stop the inevitable and express the inexpressible.
Nina Voronel
The only alternative to war is peace and the only road to peace is negotiations.
Golda Meir
Courage is ... the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared.
David Ben-Gurion
Don't be humble. You're not that great.
Golda Meir
Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you are aboard there is nothing you can do.
Golda Meir
Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature such as self preservation? (CIA Document, Project ARTICHOKE, MORI ID 144686, 1952)As cited by Dr Ellen P. Lacter, p57
Orit Badouk Epstein
There is no Zionism except the rescue of Jews.
Golda Meir
If you can't bear it, dare it.
Shlomo Reuben
Moreover, grandmothers of students who aren't doing so well in class are at even higher risk - students who are failing are fifty times more likely to lose a grandmother compared with non-failing students. In a paper exploring this sad connection, Adam speculates that the phenomenon is due to intrafamilial dynamics, which is to say, students' grandmothers care so much about their grandchildren that they worry themselves to death over the outcome of exams.
Dan Ariely
Someone once told me a joke," he said. "I'd like to be a pacifist, but people keep getting in the way.' I made a decision to fight for my friend in prison. It was a deliberate decision. It isn't the only way-it's just something I decided.
Edeet Ravel
If certain Jewish communities had distinctive qualities, they were due to history, not biology.
Shlomo Sand
These were the facts. Facts were important. They separated fiction from reality, the tawdry world of Mike Longshott from the concrete spaces of Joe's world.
Lavie Tidhar
Yet in recent years I have witnessed a new phenomenon among filmgoers, especially those considered intelligent and perceptive. I have a name for this phenomenon: the Instant White-out. People are closeted in cozy darkness; they turn off their mobile phones and willingly give themselves, for ninety minutes or two hours, to a new film that got a fourstar rating in the newspaper. They follow the pictures and the plot, understand what is spoken either in the original tongue or via dubbing or subtitles, enjoy lush locations and clever scenes, and even if they find the story superficial or preposterous, it is not enough to pry them from their seats and make them leave the theatre in the middle of the show.But something strange happens. After a short while, a week or two, sometimes even less, the film is whitened out, erased, as if it never happened. They can’t remember its name, or who the actors were, or the plot. The movie fades into the darkness of the movie house, and what remains is at most a ticket stub left accidentally in one’s pocket.
A.B. Yehoshua
Children become frustrated and resentful when they view their parents as not being interested “in how they feel and in their point of view.
Haim G. Ginott
Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a deviation in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not "corrected" as a chance process unfolds, they are merely diluted.
Amos Tversky
However, attention can be moved away from an unwanted focus, primarily by focusing intently on another target.
Daniel Kahneman
The often-used phrase “pay attention” is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.
Daniel Kahneman
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as humanism gained increasing social credibility and political power, it sprouted two very different offshoots: socialist humanism, which encompassed a plethora of socialist and communist movements, and evolutionary humanism, whose most famous advocates were the Nazis. Both offshoots agreed with liberalism that human experience is the ultimate source of meaning and authority.
Yuval Noah Harari
Humanism split into three main branches. The orthodox branch holds that each human being is a unique individual possessing a distinctive inner voice and a never-to-be-repeated string of experiences. Every human being is a singular ray of light, which illuminates the world from a different perspective, and which adds colour, depth and meaning to the universe.
Yuval Noah Harari
If I were a Palestinian at the right age, I would have joined one of the terrorist organizations at a certain stage.
Ehud Barak
We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attacks on the twin towers and the pentagon and the American struggle in Iraq. These events swung American public opinion in our favor
Benjamin Netanyahu
Meeting one’s heroes is always such a disappointment.
Lavie Tidhar
People Bond when they are having fun
Itzik Amiel
Information and complexity go hand in hand.
Lee Spetner
Perhaps it is always summer, in the place where we are young.
Lavie Tidhar
...if a person remains in a state of unforgiveness the Spirit of the Lord will allow tormentors to enter him. That's what Christ told Peter when the disciple asked, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?" (Matt. 18:21).
Benny Hinn
He has served countless kings, faked countless deaths, bided his time, waiting for you.
Leigh Bardugo
I believe in the understanding of difficult situations, difficult music, or any kind of difficulties, through familiarity. Familiarity, in this case, does not breed contempt, but breeds understanding.
Daniel Barenboim
When we get our money, you can burn kruge to keep you warm.""I'm going to pay someone to burn my kruge for me.""Why don't you pay someone else to pay someone to burn your kruge for you? That's what the big players do.
Leigh Bardugo
But when a man draws a lifeless thing into his passionate longing for dialogue, lending it independence and as it were a soul, then there may dawn in him the presentiment of a world-wide dialogue with the world-happening that steps up to him even in his environment, which consists partially of things. Or do you seriously think that the giving and taking of signs halts on the threshold of that business where an honest and open spirit is found?
Martin Buber
Really, it is unfair to say that English spelling is not an accurate rendering of speech. It is – it's only that it renders the speech of the 16th century.
Guy Deutscher
Shall I tell you the secret of true love? her father once asked her. A friend of mine liked to tell me that women love flowers. He had many flirtations, but he never found a wife. Do you know why? Because women may love flowers, but only one woman loves the scent of gardenias in late summer that remind her of her grandmother’s porch. Only one woman loves apple blossoms in a blue cup. Only one woman loves wild geraniums.That’s Mama! Inej had cried.Yes, Mama loves wild geraniums because no other flower has quite the same color, and she claims that when she snaps the stem and puts a sprig behind her ear, the whole world smells like summer. Many boys will bring you flowers. But someday you’ll meet a boy who will learn your favorite flower, your favorite song, your favorite sweet. And even if he is too poor to give you any of them, it won’t matter because he will have taken the time to know you as no one else does. Only that boy earns your heart.
Leigh Bardugo
He swept the red cloak around Inej's shoulders in a rain of petals and blossoms as she continued to strap on her knives. She looked almost as startled as the flower seller."What?" he asked as he tossed her a Mister Crimson mask that matched his own."Those were my mother's favorite flower.""Good to know Van Eck didn't cure you of sentiment.""Nice to be back, Kaz.""Good to have you back, Wraith.
Leigh Bardugo
But a person, I would say, is an individual living really with the world. And 'with' the world, I don't mean in the world- just in real contact, in real reciprocity with the world in all the points in which the world can meet man.
Martin Buber