Shmuel Yosef Agnon Quotes & Sayings

“Not every man remembers the name of the cow which supplied him with each drop of milk he has drunk.”

“But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem.”

“Our sages of blessed memory have said that we must not enjoy any pleasure in this world without reciting a blessing.”

“The fate of the singers who, like my songs, went up in flame was also the fate of the books which I later wrote. All of them went up in flame to Heaven in a fire which broke out one night at my home in Bad Homburg as I lay ill in a hospital.”

“If we eat any food, or drink any beverage, we must recite a blessing over them before and after.”

“At the age of nineteen and a half, I went to the Land of Israel to till its soil and live by the labour of my hands. As I did not find work, I sought my livelihood elsewhere.”

“As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile.”

“I returned to Jerusalem, and it is by virtue of Jerusalem that I have written all that God has put into my heart and into my pen.”

“I was five years old when I wrote my first song. It was out of longing for my father that I wrote it.”

“Through these offices it was my privilege to get to know almost every Jewish person, and those whom I did not come to know through these offices I came to know through love and a desire to know my brethren, the members of my people.”