“I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal.”

From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we’ll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.

The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.

My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.

A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.

I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.

If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.

He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.

When I write, I do it urged by an intimate necessity. I don’t have in mind an exclusive public, or a public of multitudes, I don’t think in either thing. I think about expressing what I want to say. I try to do it in the simplest way possible.

There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

We accept reality so readily – perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.

The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line.

What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?

I love business. I love helping urban communities grow. I love putting people to work of color. I love making sure – like right now the whole mortgage crisis, I want to help people get back into their homes.

What is Love? Listen! It is the rainbow that stands out, in all its glorious many-colored hues.

Coloring allows folks to express themselves in a creative way. It’s healthy.

Lynching is color line murder.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.

Virtue knows no color line.

If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green…