When a man has little time, he must take care to maintain his calm. We must act as if we had eternity before us.
We always have to blame our failures on somebody else, and dictatorships always need an external enemy to bind their followers together. As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple sol...
There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.
But chance has a taste for conspiracy.
The Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt.
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.
The outcast lepers would like to drag everything down in their ruin. And they become all the more evil, the more you cast them out; and the more you depict them as a court of lemurs who want your ruin...
The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle ag...
Because one who knows not how to seek will never find. . . .
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.
Agora selo o que não devia ser dito,no túmulo em que me torno.
I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed.
فقدتُ كلَّ يقين ، ما عدا اليقين بأنّه يوجد دائمًا وراء ظهرك شخصٌ يريدُ خداعَك
Those whom you cannot love you should, rather, fear.
Classical mythology is a catalogue of indescribable cruelty: [...] It is a world dominated by evil, where even the most beautiful beings carry out atrocities.
But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects.
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.
Marginalia we were discussing today,
Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.
To survive, you must tell stories.