Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another’s fear.

Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the moutains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.

We live for books.

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.

Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.

Books are not meant to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.

Lying about the future produces history.

Time is an eternity that stammers.

Translation is the art of failure.

Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known and have told us again and again: books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.

When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance.

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.

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.

Love is wiser than wisdom.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.

To survive, you must tell stories.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

Sometimes I look a the Moon, and I imagine that those darker spots are caverns, cities, islands, and the places that shine are those where the sea catches the light of the sun like the glass of a mirror...I would like to tell of war and friendship among the various parts of the body, the arms that do battle with the feet, and the veins that make love with the arteries or the bones with the marrow. All the stories I would like to write persecute me when I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, the little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful'.

After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?

Then why do you want to know?
Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.

What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?