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

I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

When I feel I’m going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it.

The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

Everything touches everything.

My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.

Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.

I might accept immortality, if I had to do it. But I would prefer – if there is any afterlife – to know nothing whatever about Borges, about his experiences in this world.

The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.

Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

Perhaps the apparent favor of the universe is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman breathing hard and about to be hungry?

Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.

I have committed the worst of sins one can commit. I have not been happy.

Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor.

We cannot save people. But we can love them. And this is the highest expression of our essence.

The quantum hypothesis will eventually find its exact expression in certain equations which will be a more exact formulation of the law of causality.

That science has long been neglected and declining in England, is not an opinion originating with me, but is shared by many, and has been expressed by higher authority than mine.

If A denotes one of the two constant traits, for example, the dominating one, a the recessive, and the Aa the hybrid form in which both are united, then the expression: gives the series for the progeny of plants hybrid in a pair of differing traits.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

It is my express wish that in awarding the [Nobel Prizes] no consideration be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not.

I also suspect that many workers in this field [molecular biology] and related fields have been strongly motivated by the desire, rarely actually expressed, to refute vitalism.

Dear Society’ really is my letter to society where I express the anguish I’ve been caused from such an image-based industry and culture we live in.