Top 66 Hebrew Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Hebrew Quotes from famous people such as Israel Horovitz, Sayed Kashua, Yair Lapid, Zubin Mehta, Jonathan Sacks, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I learned Hebrew from a high school teacher named Mr. C

I learned Hebrew from a high school teacher named Mr. Cohen. We would drive down the highway to meet his car, and Jewish boys from these Massachusetts towns would sit in his car and learn the lessons.
Israel Horovitz
I once wrote that the first week in Jerusalem was the hardest week of my life. I was different, other; my clothes were different, as was my language. All of the classes were in Hebrew – science, bible, literature. I sat there not understanding one word. When I tried to speak, everyone would laugh at me.
Sayed Kashua
Hebrew is the language I use to thank the Creator and, also, to swear on the road.
Yair Lapid
I’m a Persian Jew, and we don’t speak Hebrew.
Zubin Mehta
The Hebrew Bible contains multiple provisions to ensure that no one would go hungry. The corners of the field, forgotten sheaves of grain, gleanings that drop from the hands of the gleaner, and small clusters of grapes left on the vine were to be given to the poor.
Jonathan Sacks
I speak fluent Hebrew and even dream in Hebrew when we visit there, once or twice a year.
Natalie Portman
English, unlike Hebrew, is read from left to right – as are clocks. The concepts of clockwise and counterclockwise are universal, irrespective of alphabet.
Joshua Cohen
There’s no question that I am biased toward the Hebrew calendar over the Gregorian one.
Bari Weiss
I fought tooth and nail: I didn’t want to learn Hebrew. My Bar Mitzvah came around, and I didn’t want to read the Torah portion. I look back with a lot of chagrin about how I behaved.
Jesse Andrews
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.
David Novak
What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism – which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people – is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.
Harold Bloom
I’m not a religious person; I’m more of a spiritual person, so I follow the rules of the Bible that coordinate with and connect with the Hebrew culture.
Amar’e Stoudemire
Had the Hebrews not been disturbed in their progress a thousand and more years ago, they would have solved all the great problems of civilization which are being solved now under all the difficulties imposed by the spirit of the Middle Ages.
Isaac Mayer Wise
Hebrew is my first language, so it’s really the most personal and the most simple. When I write in Hebrew, I don’t look for sophistication in music; it’s just pure emotion that comes out.
Yael Naim
The Lord knows that I could not open scripture; he must by his prophetical office open it unto me. So after that being unsatisfied in the thing, the Lord was pleased to bring this scripture out of the Hebrews.
Anne Hutchinson
When I visited Israel for the first time, in 2014, on a trip sponsored by the National Religious Broadcasters, I went to the Museum of The Bible with our group. There, we saw the most ancient and original versions of both the Hebrew and Christian bibles.
Katie Pavlich
There is no other language as similar to Hebrew like Arabic.
Yitzhak Navon
I have one. I may get another during the off-season, I might get my son’s name but I’m not sure yet. The one I have is my Hebrew name, which I share with my grandfather, and it’s not the best tattoo.
Adam Pally
I have been aware since my youth that I am a Hebrew through my mother, and that is something that has played a subtle but important role in my development.
Amar’e Stoudemire
Gethsemane – the word is Hebrew for olive press – is just across the valley from Kidron, which in turn is a stone’s throw from the Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock.
Carol Drinkwater
I went to Hebrew school but opted out of a bar mitzvah.
Daveed Diggs
Physics is nothing but the ABC’s. Nature is an equation with an unknown, a Hebrew word which is written only with consonants to which reason has to add the dots.
Johann Georg Hamann
‘Walking the Bible’ describes the year that I spent retracing the five books of Moses through the desert, and I was actually working on a follow-up, which would look at the rest of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
Bruce Feiler
When I say a spoken Hebrew sentence, half of it is like the King James Bible and half of it is a hip-hop lyric. It has a roller-coaster effect.
Etgar Keret
The logical man must either deny all miracles or none, and our American Indian myths and hero stories are perhaps, in themselves, quite as credible as those of the Hebrews of old.
Charles Eastman
The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.
John Adams
I don’t hide my being Israeli. I say it in every interview. I put out a record with songs in Hebrew. The people who signed me have no connection to Judaism or Israel.
Yael Naim
I love a Hebrew National hot dog with an ice-cold Corona – no lime. If the phone rings, I won’t answer until I’m done.
Maya Angelou
I might sing a gospel song in Arabic or do something in Hebrew. I want to mix it up and do it differently than one might imagine.
Stevie Wonder
It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of today.
Henry David Thoreau
I was raised in an observant Jewish household, so for me, Hebrew prayers – the sounds, the sunlight streaming in from the stained-glass windows of a synagogue – bring my father back to me as surely as if he were sitting next to me, my head pressed against his shoulder.
Dani Shapiro
This Government has found occasion to express, in a fri

This Government has found occasion to express, in a friendly spirit, but with much earnestness, to the Government of the Czar, its serious concern because of the harsh measures now being enforced against the Hebrews in Russia.
Benjamin Harrison
I might do something in Arabic. I might do something in Hebrew.
Stevie Wonder
My dad was raised Orthodox in Atlanta. He speaks Hebrew. He speaks Yiddish. He married a Jewish woman who is not Orthodox, so I was brought up by two different kinds of Jews.
Alex Borstein
I have two favorites: Reading Kierkegaard while listening to Mozart’s Piano Concerto 9 in E Flat Major, and reading early Bazooka Joe comics in Hebrew.
Gene Weingarten
It seems likely that Jesus, being a scholarly young man, learned some Hebrew, but that’s conjecture. It’s more likely that Jesus spoke some Greek, as this language dominated the region after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century.
Jay Parini
From antiquity, Latin died but is still studied in seminaries and elite universities. So did Sanskrit in Asia. iI was replaced by Pali, but even Pali died, too. Linguists say the only ancient language which was resuscitated from the grave was Hebrew of Israel.
F. Sionil Jose
I studied at the Hebrew University Medical Faculty, graduated, and was an Israel Defense Forces’ combat physician on a Navy ship.
Aaron Ciechanover
Hebrew School was my first introduction to real feminism. I remember that much more than I remember any kind of actual religious teaching.
Jesse Andrews
Back home, almost everything I did, I did in Hebrew. I went to drama school in Hebrew, my whole career was in Hebrew, and to switch languages was something that was fascinating and more complicated than I expected it to be, even though I’ve been speaking English since I could speak.
Yael Grobglas
Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language.
Cynthia Ozick
English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.
David Crystal
When I write in Hebrew, I don’t look for sophistication in music; it’s just pure emotion that comes out.
Yael Naim
I never learnt Hebrew because my health was fragile, and it was thought that learning Hebrew would be an added burden. I regret it, because I would like to be able to join in fully. Not that I am a believer, but I would like to be.
Anita Brookner
When I first began to combine letters other than Hebrew, I read every book in German that came my way, and from these I certainly received according to the nature of my soul.
Shmuel Yosef Agnon
I grew up pretty secular. I went to public school, and all the Jews that I knew, none of them were religious. While probably half of my friends were Jewish, they were all secular Jews. We went to Hebrew school, we knew we were Jewish, but it wasn’t a major part of our existence.
Matisyahu
The Tigris is so fierce and rapid, and swallows its alluvial banks so greedily, that it is probable that some of the buildings described by the Hebrew traveller Benjamin of Tudela as existing in the twelfth century were long since carried away.
Isabella Bird
The eternal link between Lincoln’s life and Passover – the fact that Lincoln’s death, marked in the Hebrew calendar, coincides with Passover every year – is certainly fitting, and perhaps even part of the providence that Lincoln began to see in his own life and the life of his nation.
Meir Soloveichik
I was bar mitzvahed, which was hard. I feel it was the hardest thing I ever had to do; harder than making a movie. It was a lot of studying, you know. I wasn’t a perfect Hebrew reader, and also, they say when you’re reading your Torah portion, you’re not supposed to memorize it. It turned out very tricky.
Clara Mamet
In my prayers every day, which are a combination of Hebrew prayers and Shakespeare and Sondheim lyrics and things people have said to me that I’ve written down and shoved in my pocket, I also say the name of every person I’ve ever known who’s passed on.
Mandy Patinkin