“It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.”

I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.

Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we’re writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.

It’s a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.

The dictionary is based on the hypothesis — obviously an unproven one — that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.

I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.

I am almost sure to be blotted out by death, but sometimes I think it is not impossible that I may continue to live in some other manner after my physical death . Or, as Hamlet wonders, what dreams will come when we leave this body?

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.

Time can’t be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.

Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.

In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.

The visible and near-ultraviolet emission spectrum of the CH radical has been known ever since spectra of an ordinary Bunsen burner have been taken.

And to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.

There isn’t an injury known to man that Bryan Robson hasn’t had.

I know there is a terrible distance between us. But our bodies are made of stardust, and we are hurtling through space and time, toward the most beautiful collision.

Knowing sleep will set it right – if you were not to wake.

I don’t know how you are so familiar to me-or why it feels less like I am getting to know you and more as though I am remembering who you are. How every smile, every whisper brings me closer to the impossible conclusion that I have known you before, I have loved you before-in another time, a different place, some other existence.

Souls do not have calendars or clocks, nor do they understand the notion of time or distance. They only know it feels right to know one other.

In a sea of strangers, you’ve longed to know me. Your life spent sailing to my shores.