There is no greater comfort than the idea that we have chosen our own misfortunes.
Like Whitman, Chesterton thought that the mere fact of existing is so prodigious that no misfortune should exempt us from a kind of cosmic gratitude.
Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed it an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times.
I... confirm the fact – with a certain bittersweet melancholy – that everything in the world brings me back to a quotation or a book.
To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death.
If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two thousand is too vast – I mean, for the imagination to grasp. While thirty-seven people – perhaps thirty-seven are too many, perhaps seventeen would have been better or even seven – but still thirty-seven are still within the scope of one’s imagination.
Since then my loneliness does not pain me, because I know my redeemer lives and he will finally rise above the dust.
What eternity is to time, the Aleph is to space.
As we all know, there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition.
Little has happened to me in my lifetime, but I have read much.
The curious thing about The Ring and the Book, to which I will now return, is that although each character recounts the same events, and although there is no difference in what they tell, there is a fundamental difference, which belongs to the realm of human psychology, the fact that each of us believes we are justified. For example, the count admits he is a murderer, but the word “murderer” is too general. We know this from reading other books.
A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a rhombus – all these are forms we can fully intuit; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a young colt, a small herd of cattle on a mountainside, a flickering fire and its uncountable ashes, and the many faces of a dead man at a wake. I have no idea how many stars he saw in the sky.
Poetry is given to the poet. I don’t think a poet can sit down at will and write. If he does, nothing worthwhile can come of it.
La derrota tiene una dignidad que la ruidosa victoria no merece.
Felices los amados y los amantes y los que pueden prescindir del amor. Felices los felices.
El ejecutor de una empresa atroz debe imaginar que ya la ha cumplido, debe imponerse un porvenir que sea irrevocable como el pasado.
The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms.
What is past is what is real.
I felt what we always feel when someone dies–the sad awareness, now futile, of how little it would have cost us to have been more loving. One forgets that one is a dead man conversing with dead men.
But I will relate what happened with absolute honesty; that, perhaps, will help me understand it. After all, when one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.