Chaim Potok
Chaim Potok
Chaim Potokwas an American Jewish author and rabbi. Potok is most famous for his first book The Chosen, which was listed on The New York Times’ best seller list for 39 weeks and sold more than 3,400,000 copies...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 February 1929
CityBuffalo, NY
CountryUnited States of America
eye men long
I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.
drinking sleep men
He taught them that the purpose of a man is to make his life holy--every aspect of his life: eating, drinking praying, sleeping. God is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only because we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly.
men flames evil
A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be nurtured, it must be fanned into flame. It must learn to seek out other sparks, it must dominate the shell. Anything can be a shell, Reuven. Anything. Indifference, laziness, brutality, and genius. Yes, even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark.
passion winning men
In our time ... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.
men given blink-of-an-eye
A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.
men meaning-of-life given
The span of a man's life - that is nothing. But what a man makes of that span - that is something. A man must make his own meaning for life. Meaning is not automatically given to life.
men quality may
A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant.
home men people
Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a 'universal' without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.
accidents blink events eye fortuitous found guess life meet reminds
Life is like the blink of an eye. What is that worth? Nothing. But the eye that blinks - that is something. I guess I blinked, on accident. Sometimes, though, I have found accidents to be the most fortuitous events in my life. You meet the one person who reminds you what you are, what you do, how to be happy.
american-author aware core essential hopes particular profound related strain
Well, one hopes that if you're really related to the core of your particular culture, you have profound commitments to it, and that you are aware of how much you can strain it before you do violence to its essential nature.
danny element encounters readings secular
Well, in The Chosen, Danny Saunders, from the heart of his religious reading of the world, encounters an element in the very heart of the secular readings of the world - Freudian psychoanalytic theory.
adversary almost elements experience found freud human odds religion utterly ways western
And these two elements are at odds with one another because Freud is utterly adversary to almost all the ways of structuring the human experience found in Western religions. No Western religion can countenance Freud's view of man.
american-author nature
And yet there are some magnificent things from Freud, profound insights into the nature of man.
advance american-author paragraph people proceeds scene sentence
What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.