A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
He thought he would become accustomed to the idea, not yet understanding that it is useless to become accustomed to the loss of a father, for it will never happen a second time: might as well leave the wound open.
The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity.
If culture did not filter, it would be inane – as inane as the formless, boundless Internet is on its own. And if we all possessed the boundless knowledge of the Web, we would be idiots! Culture is an instrument for making a hierarchical system of intellectual labor.
When a spy sells something entirely new, all he needs to do is recount something you could find in any second-hand book stall.
The faith a movement proclaims doesn’t count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.
I was becoming addicted, Diotallevi was becoming corrupted, Belbo was becoming converted. But all of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.
Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.
Machines, he said, are an effect of art, which is nature’s ape, and they reproduce not its forms but the operation itself.
What does the philosopher say? Odi ergo sum. I hate therefore I am.
Culture isn’t knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes.
Dreams of flying have haunted the collective imagination since time immemorial.
Omnia mundi creatura quasi liber et pictura nobis est in speculum.
Pengetahuan Tuhan mewujud dalam pengetahuan manusia.
Often the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself.
When men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
I am not on Facebook and on Twitter because the purpose of my life is to avoid messages. I receive too many messages from the world, and so I try to avoid that.
If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you’re an idiot.
Being a professional philosopher is, I would say, feeling natural to think about small and great problems. It is the only pleasure.