“Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.”

You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.

All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.

You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn’t work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.

Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.

A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.

Nothing fortuitous happens in a child’s world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.

One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating.

The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.

It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it

Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

I couldn’t think. The basics of my life seemed altered and thrown into question.

Invest in basic research and recruit the best minds.

The basic notion of justice, is that the rights of everybody are equals, in principle. In the rights of others, we have to respect our own rights. It is only in that condition that we can reasonnably require that it be respected by others.

My father insisted that I learnt the Koran and encouraged me to understand the basic traditions and beliefs of Islam but without imposing any particular views. He was an overwhelming personality but open-minded and liberal.

In terms of pots and pans, I just use the basics – Im not a snob like that.

Flow systems have two basic features (properties).

It won’t be decided in one election, but it is a basic choice between an open and progressive Iraq and one that is backward and continues to fall behind.

I find that your basic Internet chat board is way too vitriolic for my taste.