Tevye The Dairyman Quotes

You see how it is, my dear friends. There's no pleasing everyone. It's hopeless to even try, and the more you play the peacemaker, the less peaceful things become.

When the heart is full it runs out of the eyes.

There’s an old saying, you know, that if you scratch a secret, you’ll find a thief.

I never turn down a drink. Among friend's it's always appropriate. A man is only a man as they say but brandy is still brandy. You'll find that in the Talmud too.

You know what, Pan Sholem Aleichem? Let’s talk about something more cheerful. Have you heard any news of the cholera in Odessa?

we’ll start right in on the knishes, or the kreplach, or the knaidlach, or the varnishkes, or the pirogen, or the blintzes.

Tell me yourself—rather than suffering because of daughters, as Tevye has, is it not a thousand times better to lie in the ground and bake bagels?

A man is only flesh and blood, after all; you can’t fill a stomach with words.

Don’t you know that you can skin the bear in the forest, but you can’t sell its hide there?

It’s no picnic, your Russian grammar; you have to mind your p’s and q’s.

There were, it appeared, more ways to skin a Katz than one …

I’m only human. A house without a woman is no house …’ It did as much good as last winter’s snow, of course.

You see, I come from Mezritch, though I grew up in Mazapevke, but Vorotolivke is where I’m still registered.

In short, he kept waiving me such waivers that I waved goodbye to him and went to see a third lawyer, that’s where I went.

I only wanted to be good—the trouble is that being good gets you nowhere.

Once, matches were made behind a child’s back; you came home from shaking hands with your in-laws, you wished the bride or groom a mazel tov, and that was that.

Then she held out her hands, though all she could say was a single whispered word: “Pa-pa …” Please don’t think any worse of me for having tears in my eyes now.

There’s a limit to everything; even chicken soup with kreplach can get to be too much.

Well, a matchmaker, as you know, can talk a wall into marrying a hole in the ground;

Do you know what my grandmother used to say? What a shame it is we have mouths, because if we didn’t we’d never go hungry

What do I care if the weather is sunny When I’m all out of luck and all out of money

It’s an old Jewish custom to pick up and go elsewhere at the first mention of a pogrom.

We had a good scare in our town when they broke out, because we were afraid pogroms would come next.

Where were they coming from? From Zhmerinka, and from Kazatin, and from Razdyelne, and from Popelne, and from a few-other places that were equally famous for their roughnecks.

In short, I began getting offers from all over the world: from Kamenets, and from Yelisavet, and from Gomel, and from Lubin, and all the way from Mogilev, and from Berdichev, and Kaminka, and even Brody.

After witnessing the pogrom, one of the best-known Jewish authors of the twentieth century, Sholem Aleichem, left the city and the country for faraway New York. Anticipation of a pogrom became a major theme in his last story about Tevye the Dairyman. The subject is also prominent in those of his stories on which the Broadway classic Fiddler on the Roof is based. In both the story and the musical, the city policeman is sympathetic to the Jews. That was true of some policemen, but many stood by during the pogroms, encouraging the violence. That seems to have been the case in Kyiv. By the time the police took action against the perpetrators of the pogrom, it had been going on for two days.