“While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one.”

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

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.

Vain hopes are like certain dreams of those who wake.

Awakening begins when a man realizes that he is going nowhere and does not know where to go.

You can never awaken using the same system that put you to sleep in the first place.

We are born from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awakening

Union of hearts, not hands, does a marriage make, and sympathy of mind keeps love awake.

Surprise keeps the reader awake. The only alternative is to continue saying what the reader is expecting. What fun is that?

All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.

I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.