Yehuda Amichai famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Cities #Jerusalem #Eternity
Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Happiness #Hiding #Behinds
Knowledge of peace passes from country to country, like children's games, which are so much alike, everywhere.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Country #Children #Games
And I said to myself: That's true, hope needs to be like barbed wire to keep out despair, hope must be a mine field.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Wire #Despair #Fields
The memory of my father is wrapped up in white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day of work. Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits out of his hat, he drew love from his small body.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Memories #Father #Taken
Tonight I think again of many days that are sacrificed for one night of love. Of the waste and the fruit of the waste, of plenty and of fire. And how painlessly-time.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Time #Night #Thinking
I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Trying #Poet #Humans
My poems are political in the deeper sense of the word. Political means to live in your time, to be a man of your time.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Mean #Men #Political
The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Writing #Reason #Poet
There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Two #Language
I think the end is endless. It's either a big black hole or a big white light or both together. But it's totally meaningless, because even if someone would explain it, I wouldn't understand it.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Thinking #Light #White
I was a very religious child - I went to synagogue at least once, sometimes twice, a day. And I remember my religiousness as good - I think religion is good for children, especially educated children, because it allows for imagination, a whole imaginative world apart from the practical world.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Religious #Children #Thinking
I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Real #Drinking #Writing
The world of religion isn't a logical world; that's why children like it. It's a world of worked-out fantasies, very similar to children's stories or fairy tales.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Children #World #Stories
Here (Jerusalem), tears do not weaken the eyes, they only polish and shine the hardness of faces like stone.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Eye #Shining #Tears
From the place where we are right, flowers will not grow in the spring.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Spring #Flower #Grows
Iâ€™ve never been in those places where Iâ€™ve never been and never will be, I have no share in the infinity of light-years and dark-years, but the darkness is mine, and the light, and my time is my own.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Dark #Light #Years
A flock of sheep near the airport or a high voltage generator beside the orchard: these combinations open up my life like a wound, but they also heal it. That's why my feelings always come in twos.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Sheep #Airports #Feelings
Every intelligent person, whether hes an artist or not - a mathematician, a doctor, a scientist - possesses a poetic way of seeing and describing the world.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Intelligent #Artist #Doctors
Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Drinking #Writing #Glasses
God has pity on kindergarten children
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Children #Kindergarten #Pity
It was not an adventure; it was my life.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Adventure
And as we stray further from love, we multiply the words. Had we remained together we could have become a silence.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Love #Silence #Together
Love is like a reservoir of kindness and pleasure, like silos and pools during a siege.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Kindness #Love Is #Siege
And what will you do now? You'll collect loves Like stamps. You've got doubles and no one Will trade you and you have the damaged ones.
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Stamps #Trade
The soul inside me is the last foreign language I'm learning,
-- Yehuda Amichai

#Soul #Lasts #Language

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