SaturdayJan 31, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
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.
Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.
I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.
When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés moves us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.... Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime.
'But why doesn't the Gospel ever say that Christ laughed?' I asked, for no good reason. 'Is Jorge right?' 'Legions of scholars have wondered whether Christ laughed. The question doesn't interest me much. I believe he never laughed, because, omniscient as the son of God had to be, he knew how we Christians would behave....'
In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness.
A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.
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.
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.
What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.
'Sir,' Saint-Savin replied, 'the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life. We should rather aspire to a heaven where only the planets live in eternal bliss, receiving neither rewards nor condemnations, but enjoying merely their own eternal motion in the arms of the void.'
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us.
Terrorism [is] a biological consequence of the multinationals, just as a day of fever is the reasonable price of an effective vaccine ... The conflict is between great powers, not between demons and heroes. Unhappily, therefore, is the nation that finds the 'heroes' underfoot, especially if they still think in religious terms and involve the population in their bloody ascent to an uninhabited paradise.
'You cannot believe what you are saying.' 'Well, no. Hardly ever. But the philosopher is like the poet. The latter composes ideal letters for an ideal nymph, only to plumb with his words the depths of passion. The philosopher tests the coldness of his gaze, to see how far he can undermine the fortress of bigotry.'
'I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand is the relation among signs.... I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.' 'But in imagining an erroneous order you still found something....' 'What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. 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 only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.'
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.
The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.'
The truth is an anagram of an anagram.
In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace.
'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.
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