Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.
The prince of darkness is a gentleman. – Shakespeare, King Lear, III, iv.
Alamut could be reached only astride eagles.
The Frenchman doesn’t really know what he wants, but knows perfectly well that he doesn’t want what he has. And the only way he knows of saying it is by singing songs.
Jacopo seemed to have forgotten his elegiac mood and competed with Diotallevi in imagining absurd machines – only to discover, each time, that the machines had already been invented.
The good of a book lies in it being read. A Book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in turn speak of things.
Does it make sense to choose the wrong Opportunity just to convince yourself that you would have chosen the right one – had you had the Opportunity? I.
I lost myself in the contemplation of nature, trying to forget my thoughts and to look only at beings as they appear, and to forget myself, joyfully, in the sight of them.
Bauman notes that a typical feature of the interregnum, once the faith in salvation from above, from the state, or from revolution is gone, is indignation. Such indignation knows what it doesn’t want, but not what it does.
If God existed, he would be a library.
I sought peace in everything, but never was I happier than in a corner with a book.
Amparo was conquered, and I felt a twinge of jealousy. I.
Crecer en las sombras es el privilegio de quien se dispone a conquistar el mundo.
Creo que, a ciertas alturas, ya no hay diferencia entre acostumbrarse a fingir que se cree y acostumbrarse a creer.
Thus God knows the world, because He conceived it in His mind, as if from the outside, before it was created, and we do not know its rule, because we live inside it, having found it already made.
There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,” he said, “to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn’t yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.
Terrorism is not the enemy of the great systems; on the contrary, it is their natural counterweight, accepted, programmed.
European identity, it seems, is only perceived by educated people. And that is sad, but it is a start.
In a certain sense I could agree with the Futurists that war is the only hygiene of the world, except for one little correction: It would be, if only volunteers were allowed to wage it.
They keep saying that their kingdom is not of this world, then take everything they can lay their hands on. Civilization will never reach perfection until the last stone of the last church has fallen on the last priest, and the earth is rid of that evil lot.
To each memorable image you attach a thought, a label, a category, a piece of the cosmic furniture, syllogisms, an enormous sorites, chains of apothegms, strings of hypallages, rosters of zeugmas, dances of hysteron proteron, apophantic logoi, hierarchic stoichea, processions of equinoxes and parallaxes, herbaria, genealogies of gymnosophists – and so on, to infinity.