Leonard Shlain Quotes

Christianity and Judaism are united above all in their common affirmation and implementation of the moral teaching of the Hebrew Bible, or 'Old Testament,' and the traditions of interpretation of that teaching.

Two of the chief defenders of the faith in the Old Testament and in the New - Moses and Paul - were both well-versed in the language, the thinking, and the philosophy of their cultures.

First, it is not unimportant that the legislative texts of the Old Testament are placed in the mouth of Moses and within the narrative framework of the sojourn at Sinai.

For many people during many centuries, mankind's history before the coming of Christianity was the history of the Jews and what they recounted of the history of others. Both were written down in the books called the Old Testament, [the Torah] the sacred writings of the Jewish people ... They were the first to arrive at an abstract notion of God and to forbid his representation by images. No other people has produced a greater historical impact from such comparatively insignificant origins and resources.

With the history of Moses no book in the world, in point of antiquity, can contend.

In my town we studied the five Books of Moses, but rarely the prophets. We studied the Talmud so much that I sometimes knew the prophets because of the prophetic quotations in the Talmud. We almost never studied the prophets themselves.

If President Nixon's secretary, Rosemary Woods, had been Moses' secretary, there would only be eight commandments.

Moses, who said to the children of Israel, Wear your galoshes; I never did this trick before. Never got a dinner!

It's such a unique story. Book of Joshua in the Bible wasn't always my favorite book, by the way. Only some ago did I realize that this book covers a seven-year period in the history of ancient Israel in which they literally went undefeated.They did have one setback, but outside of that, they defeated over 30 kings. They recaptured the Promised Land. They did what their ancestors said they could not.

Language is what books do very well and movement is what movies does very well.

The clerisy are those who seek, and find, delight and enlargement of life in books. The clerisy are those for whom reading is a personal art.

It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose - a political, social and religious purpose - that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs

The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for "literalists," becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy.

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book.

But there's nothing more profound than creating something out of nothing.

What care I if it be "wild and improbable" and "lacking in literary art"? I refuse to be any longer hampered by such canons of criticism. The one essential thing I demand of a book is that it should interest me. If it does, I forgive it every other fault.

Some people get lots of pleasure; From books or from music or art; But boys seem to think it's fantastic; To just have a really good fart.

The shaping of taste is essentially the science of merchandising, whether of detergents or cars or books or objects of fine and decorative art.

There are some very powerful contributions to knowledge in the scientific world or the legal world, but art is singular. That's why every dictator gets rid of the artists first. They burn the books and execute the artists first. Then they get on with whatever else they're interested in. Art might do something. It's dangerous.

If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.

I started going out with one of my managers and he really grew me up in a lot of ways. He introduced me not just to being a full-time traveler, which I was, but he was also really very interested in history and art and continued to open my eyes up to regional history; less splashy histories. He was interested in historical societies and stuff like that. He introduced me to a way of looking at the way communities form that is the foundation for the book that I've just finished writing that has to do with what I see as effective community-building wherever I've been traveling.

Sometimes listening to music can motivate you. It can. But if you're a musician, that isn't always the way to get new ideas because you don't want to take somebody else's ideas. You need to find your own. So if you go to different artistic mediums, whether it's dance or it's visual arts or films or books, stories, sometimes it gets you hearing things, hearing progressions that you wouldn't come up with if you were just listening to other music because you don't want to copy progressions you've just heard.

It became a question of taste. I have a certain taste in art history. And that - I had a huge library of art history books in my studio. And I would simply have the models go through those books with me, and we began a conversation about, like, what painting means, why we do it, why people care about it why or how it can mean or make sense today.

in reading ... stories, you can be many different people in many different places, doing things you would never have a chance to do in ordinary life. It's amazing that those twenty-six little marks of the alphabet can arrange themselves on the pages of a book and accomplish all that. Readers are lucky - they will never be bored or lonely.