A library’s ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste’s stall, a place for trouvailles.
Accordingly, the choice between a literature review and a research thesis is linked to the student’s ability and maturity. And regrettably, it is often linked to financial factors, because a working student certainly has less time and energy to dedicate to long hours of research and trips to foreign research institutes or libraries, and often lacks money for the purchase of rare and expensive books and other resources.
You spend a life seeking the Opportunity, without realizing that the decisive moment, the moment that justifies birth and death, has already passed. It will not return, but it was – full, dazzling, generous as every revelation.
The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer.
There always exists a context that is capable of reproposing as new a codified catachresis or dead metaphor.
Holography could prosper only in America, a country obsessed with realism, where, if a reconstruction is to be credible, it must be absolutely iconic, a perfect likeness, a “real” copy of the reality being represented.
You respect books by using them, not leaving them alone.
World visions can conceive of everything, except alternative world visions...
If the book is yours and it does not have antiquarian value, do not hesitate to annotate it. Do not trust those who say that you must respect books. You respect books by using them, not leaving them alone. Even if the book is unmarked, you won’t make much money reselling it to a bookseller, so you may as well leave traces of your ownership.
A paradoxical consequence: hidden behind every false conspiracy there’s perhaps a conspiracy by someone who stands to gain from presenting it as true.
You are not Proust. Do not write long sentences. If they come into your head, write them, but then break them down. Do not be afraid to repeat the subject twice, and stay away from too many pronouns and subordinate clauses.
If there is something paradoxical, in the sense of curious or bizarre, it is that the word paradox has two fairly different meanings: one which is used in logic and philosophy, and the other in rhetoric.
A paradox is a genuine reversal of the commonly accepted point of view, one that presents an unacceptable world, thereby eliciting resistance and rejection, and yet, if we make an effort to understand it, it is one that leads to knowledge; eventually it seems to be witty because it has to be admitted that it is true.
Madmen and children always speak the truth.
Sensing that I ought to become more closely involved in political matters, I realized the most attractive news to fabricate would be what these idle minds were expecting, rather than what the newspapers reported as solid fact.
An old saying had it that war is too serious to be left to the military. These days it needs bringing up to date: the world has become too complex to be left to those who used to run it.
Here, then, is another proposition: The medium is not the message; the message becomes what the receiver makes of it, applying to it his own codes of reception, which are neither those of the sender nor those of the scholar of communications.
The advantage of a big city, move on a few meters and you find solitude again.
Superstition brings bad luck.
In America you don’t say, “Give me another coffee”; you ask for “More coffee”; you don’t say that cigarette A is longer than cigarette B, but that there’s “more” of it, more than you’re used to having, more than you might want, leaving a surplus to throw away – that’s prosperity.
As the Chinese said, to curse someone: “May you live in an interesting period.