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If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet... [at least for your own situation. Blind optimism is just as foolish. The solution is a rigorously balanced, rational outlook.]

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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Isaac Bashevis Singer
Age: 87 †
Born: 1904
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: July 24
Author
Autobiographer
Esperantist
Journalist
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Isaac Bashevis-Singer
Yitsḥoḳ Basheṿis
Yitsḥaḳ Basheṿis-Zinger
Yitsḥaḳ Basheṿis- Zinger
I. B. Singer
Itzhak Bashevis Singer
Yitsḥoḳ Bashevis-Zinger
Isaac Bashevis
Yitsḥaḳ Basheṿis
Yitsḥoḳ Bashevis- Zinger
Chance
Solution
Keep
Foolish
Going
Rational
Rigorously
Good
Solutions
Outlook
Things
Blind
Anticipation
Saying
Balanced
Least
Prophet
Situation
Optimism

More quotes by Isaac Bashevis Singer

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How can we speak of right and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood? How can we pray to God for mercy if we ourselves have no mercy? Nobel laureate in literature.
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But my gloom did not lessen. I knew that I'd had a bad dream, and I stood in the dark trying to recollect it. The second I closed my eyes, I was with the dead. They did things words cannot express. They spoke madness. (Hanka)
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Two important things are to have a genuine interest in people and to be kind to them. Kindness, I've discovered, is everything.
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Whenever I'm in trouble, I pray. And because I'm in trouble all of the time, I pray almost constantly.
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When literature becomes overly erudite, it means that interest in the art has gone and curiosity about the artist is what's important. It becomes a kind of idolatry.
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Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.
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While facts never become obsolete or stale, commentaries always do.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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The characters have their own lives and their own logic, and you have to act accordingly.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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There is no death. How can there be death if everything is part of the Godhead? The soul never dies and the body is never really alive.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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The more you see what other people do, the more you learn about yourself.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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Men want all women to lie down as whores and get up as virgins.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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If Moses had been paid newspaper rates for the Ten Commandments, he might have written the Two Thousand Commandments.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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I don't invent characters because the Almightly has already invented millions... Just like experts at fingerprints do not create fingerprints but learn how to read them.
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One has to trust that God knows how to manage the world.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
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It seems that the analysis of character is the highest human entertainment. And literature does it, unlike gossip, without mentioning names.
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A story to me must have some surprise...I must have a passion to write the story.
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Man is a disgusting thing. If you beat him he starts to scream, but if it is the other one who is beaten, then he constructs a theory.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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Various philosophers and religious leaders tried to convince their disciples and followers that animals are nothing more than machines without a soul, without feelings. However, anyone who has ever lived with an animal-be it a dog, a bird, or even a mouse-knows that this theory is a brazen lie, invented to justify cruelty.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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I am not ashamed to admit that I belong to those who fantasize that literature is capable of bringing new horizons and new perspectives--philosophical, religious, aesthetical and even social.
Isaac Bashevis Singer