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...
The devil is not the prince of matter; the devil is the arrogance of spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in mov...
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.
If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teachthem how to use television.
فقدتُ كلَّ يقين ، ما عدا اليقين بأنّه يوجد دائمًا وراء ظهرك شخصٌ يريدُ خداعَك
The first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny h...
I have never encountered, not even in witchcraft trials, a dead man whom God or the Devil allowed to climb up from the abyss to erase the evidence of his misdeed—then
Can you call yourself a coward simply because the courage of others seems to you out of proportion to the triviality of the occasion? Thus wisdom creates cowards. And thus you miss Opportunity while s...
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.
But chance has a taste for conspiracy.
Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, 'How are you, you o...
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.
I love the smell of book ink in the morning.
So, Colonna, please demonstrate to our friends how it's possible to respect, or appear to respect, one fundamental principle of democratic journalism, which is separating fact from opinion. ...''Simpl...
Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.
Classical mythology is a catalogue of indescribable cruelty: [...] It is a world dominated by evil, where even the most beautiful beings carry out atrocities.
History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributin...
I like the notion of stubborn incuriosity. To cultivate a stubborn incuriosity, you have to limit yourself to certain areas of knowledge. You cannot be totally greedy. You have to oblige yourself not...
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.
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.