Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know.

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.

I don't know, maybe we're always looking for the right place, maybe it's within reach, but we don't recognize it. Maybe to recognize it, we have to believe in it.

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake.

Your masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart!

Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.

National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to enquiry (William of Baskerville)

Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy?

Translation is the art of failure.

Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened. "Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?" William asked me, looking down from his great height.

But if there is no cosmic Plan? What a mockery, to live in exile when no one sent you there. Exile from a place, moreover, that does not exist.

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

Libraries are fascinating places; sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of traveling to distant lands.

A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.

Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.

The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.

You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.

The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity.

I seal that which was not to be said in the tomb that I become.

Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.

They dwell in my light, while I dwell in unbearable darkness, the source of that light.

The light in her eyes was beyond description, yet it did not instill improper thoughts: it inspired a love tempered by awe, purifying the hearts it inflamed.

From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola

I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses

For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.

But I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.

There was no plot... and I discovered it by mistake.

Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.

In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

Whoever reflects on four things I would be better if he were never born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, that which is after.

The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.

And so I fell devoutly asleep and slept a long time, because young people seem to need sleep more than the old, who have already slept so much and are preparing to sleep for all eternity.

There are only four questions of importance in life: What is sacred, of what is the spirit made, what is worth living for, and what is worth dying for. The answer to all of them is the same. Only LOVE.

...we can only add to the world, where we believe it ends, more parts similar to those we already know (an expanse made again and always of water and land, stars and skies).

The book is like the wheel - once invented, it cannot be bettered.

I was in a maze. No matter which way I turned, it was the wrong way.

He is always on the brink of suicide... because he seeks salvation through the routine formulas suggested to him by the society in which he lives.

... we read novels because they give us the comfortable sensation of living in worlds where the notion of truth is indisputable, while the actual world seems to be a more treacherous place.

The fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their conditions. Otherwise, why would you be recompensed with hell?

That day, I began to be incredulous. Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity.

Man's principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?