Chaim Potok Quotes

The more you own, the more you know you don't own.

We need to appreciate how precious life is.

See how today's achievement is only tomorrow's confusion;See how possession always cheapens the thing that was precious.

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

A narrow compass! and yet there Dwelt all that 's good, and all that 's fair; Give me but what this riband bound, Take all the rest the sun goes round.

I had gone through a near-death experience, and that gives you an insight into how fleeting life is, and what's important.

There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places. My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.

Don't fear your mortality, because it is this very mortality that gives meaning and depth and poignancy to all the days that will be granted to you.

No man can lose what he never had.

Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?

I don't think anyone has a right to possess anything he doesn't love - art or anything else.

I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

When you have things taken away, you promise you'll never take anything for granted ever again.

I realise how precious life is, probably because I've seen how it can be taken away.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

When you're in danger of losing a thing it becomes precious and when it's around us, it's in tedious abundance and we take it for granted as if we're going to live forever, which we're not.

Treasure each other in the recognition that we do not know how long we shall have each other.

When something is at risk or in danger or about to be lost, those are the moments you start to realize how much it means to you.

I now know that things I always thought I could depend on can crash in an instant. Because of the love that I have been shown, I now know what it means to be 'beloved.' I now know that no breath is to be taken for granted.

I hope maybe 'The Returned,' in some small way, can contribute to the argument of the poignancy of human life and make people not take for granted things.

I cherish every moment, because success can be taken right away from you.

What makes us really human is it's in the presence of death that we start valuing life.

We all take life for granted, one way or another.

Life is a precious gift - a gift we often take for granted until it is threatened.

We tend to take a great deal for granted, because you feel like you're going to live forever. It's only if you lose a friend, or maybe have a near-death experience, [that] many events and people in your life suddenly attain real significance.