Great Throughts Treasury

"The human being is really something extraordinary. Has discovered fire, built cities, magnificent poems written since interpretations of the world, invented mythologies etc ... But at the same time has continued to make war on fellow human beings, not has ceased to deceive, to destroy the environment. algebraic sum of the intellectual vigor and stupidity gives a result close to zero. So, deciding to talk about stupidity, we make it in a way a tribute to this creature that is half brilliant, for half imbecile"

"The human soul is the real world intercourse because, on one hand, is directed toward the divine and, on the other, is introduced into the body and controls the world."

"The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad."

"The jealous man is not able, nor does he have the will, to imagine the opposite of what he fears, indeed he cannot feel joy except in the magnification of his own sorrow, and by suffering through the magnified enjoyment from which he knows he is banned. The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell -- in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond."

"The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maiden's?"

"The moment a secret is revealed, it seems little."

"The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis."

"The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the less I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; and as the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently, without asking too many questions."

"The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars."

"The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless."

"The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell -- in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond."

"The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly."

"The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea."

"The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. If it had been possible he would have settled the matter otherwise, and without bloodshed. He doesn't boast of his own death or of others'. But he does not repent. He suffers and keeps his mouth shut; if anything, others then exploit him, making him a myth, while he, the man worthy of esteem, was only a poor creature who reacted with dignity and courage in an event bigger than he was."

"The reason closure is a cliché is that it is used too often, too imprecisely, and doesn't in any case reflect reality. In reality, such closure in broken friendships and much else in life is rarely achieved; only death brings closure and then not always for those still living."

"The step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is all too brief"

"The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked."

"Then we are living in a place abandoned by God, I said, disheartened. Have you found any places where God would have felt at home? William asked me, looking down from his great height."

"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."

"The truth is an anagram of an anagram."

"There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics. Cretins don't even talk; they sort of slobber and stumble. Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. Fools don't claim that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking about dogs. They offend all the rules of conversation, and when they really offend, they're magnificent. Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says that all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, therefore cats barkMorons will occasionally say something that's right, but they say it for the wrong reasonA lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn't know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic on the other hand, doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all ide fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars. There are lunatics who don't bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden"

"There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past. As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten."

"There are things you see coming, not that you fall in love because you fall, you fall because in that period had a desperate need to fall in love. During periods when you feel like falling in love look out well where you get: like drinking a filter , the kind that make you fall in love with the first thing that happens. might be a platypus."

"There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries...."

"There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation."

"There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition."

"There was no plot... and I discovered it by mistake."

"There, Master Niketas,’ Baudolino said, ‘when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. A bit with the help of wine, and a bit with that of the green honey. 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."

"There's only one culture: strangle the last priest with the entrails of the last Rosicrucian."

"There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him."

"There is no such thing as happy music."

"Thus we have on stage two men, each of whom knows nothing of what he believes the other knows, and to deceive each other reciprocally both speak in allusions, each of the two hoping (in vain) that the other holds the key to his puzzle."

"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."

"This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain."

"To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text."

"Time is an eternity that stammers."

"To imagine a necessary element in order equates universe complicated for us, people with serious reading, with what is superstition for the illiterate. Ideas not change the world. Persons few ideas are less subject to error, which is taken after I do not mind everyone and anyone, and succeed, get rich, get strong positions, members, people with decorations, writers renowned academics, journalists. Could you stop being stupid when you do so well own business? Fool I am, I wanted to fight with the windmills."

"To survive, you must tell stories."

"To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time."

"Today I leave on television on is a sign of elegance."

"Today we do not realize that the uniqueness of a work of art not to be found on an idea conceived by an act of grace and independent experience of nature in art converge all our experiences, developed and summarized imaginative processes as normal, except that which makes the work unique is the way in which this development becomes concrete and gives the perception, through a process of interaction between experience, desire autonomous art and legality material on which it works."

"Today I realize that many recent exercises in deconstructive reading read as if inspired by my parody. This is parody's mission: it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity."

"Translation is the art of failure."

"True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth."

"Today we mean by freedom is the ability to belief and opinion to choose which you like the most on and which are all interchangeable - and it makes the state no matter whether you are Mason, Christian, Jew, or a follower of the Great Turk. example, one indifferent to the truth."

"We are all dwarfs, William admitted, but dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of giants, and small though we are, we sometimes manage to see farther on the horizon than they."

"Try to condense your thoughts in as few words as possible, avoid long sentences - or broken by carved inevitably confuse the careless readers - so that your speech does not contribute to quell'inquinamento information that is certainly (especially when filled with unnecessary details unnecessary, or at least not necessary) one of the tragedies of our time dominated by the power of the media."

"Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors."

"We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image as opposed to a symbol is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyze the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being within itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it."

"Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion."