The ordinary true, or purely real, cannot be the object of the arts. Illusion on a ground of truth, – that is the secret of the fine arts.
It is always our inabilities that vex us.
In really good acting we should be able to believe that what we hear and see is of our own imagining; it should seem to be to us as a charming dream.
All good verses are like impromptus made at leisure.
The sound of the drum drives out thought; for that very reason it is the most military of instruments.
We should make ourselves loved, for men are only just towards those whom they love.
Our life is woven wind.
Justice is the right of the weakest.
Heaven is for those who think of it.
We know God easily, if we do not constrain ourselves to define him.
The idea of the nest in the bird’s mind, where does it come from?
We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.
Monuments are the grappling-irons that bind one generation to another...
Through memory we travel against time, through forgetfulness we follow its course.
Those for whom the world is not enough: saints, conquerors, poets, and all lovers of books.
Are you listening to the ones who keep quiet?
Es preciso que exista algo sagrado.
Figure, movement. Everything happens, says Pascal, from figure and movement. To say in this case that everything happens from movement, for every figure is no more than the lingering trace of a movement that has already ceased. Thus the letters that I am forming now, for example, are only the pen’s lingering trace of the movement of my hand.
Cercando la parola si trovano i pensieri.
We love repose of mind so well, that we are arrested by anything which has even the appearance of truth; and so we fall asleep on clouds.
Power makes you attractive; it even makes women love old men.