“I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.”

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

A poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.

Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.

A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships

Censorship is the mother of metaphor.

The mightiest love was granted him Love that does not expect to be loved.

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.

Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.

The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

I have always come to life after coming to books.

No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

When we hold onto our history, we do it at the expense of our destiny…. At some point you just have to let go of what you thought should have happened and live in what’s happening.

Look at the flowers, and the birds in the sky, if they never worry then why should I? for he holds my life in his hands.

Nails were not enough to hold God-and-man nailed and fastened on the Cross, had not love held Him there.

We ought even to hold as a fixed principle that what I see white I believe to be black, if the superior authorities define it to be so.

For the heart that needs a dose of courage don’t run, don’t hide, don’t fear, hold on.

When you hold a grudge, you want someone else’s sorrow to reflect your level of hurt but the two rarely meet.

Nothing is more like a wise man than a fool who holds his tongue.

I hold that the mark of a genuine idea is that its possibility can be proved, either a priori by conceiving its cause or reason, or a posteriori when experience teaches us that it is in fact in nature.