Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country

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

If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.

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.

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

There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

To survive, you must tell stories.

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Ye have not chosen me but I have chosen you.

I'm hopeful that the energy efficiency and public buildings bill will have their endorsement.

When running up a hill, it is all right to give up as many times as you wish-as long as your feet keep on moving.

I have embraced crying mothers who have lost their children because our politicians put their personal agendas before the national good. I have no patience for injustice.

As man's love or hatred, so he. Love and hatred exist only personified.

Set all things in their own peculiar place, and know that order is the greatest grace.

We must beat the iron while it is hot, but we may polish it at leisure.

You are only pretentious if you are not sincere.

I never ask anyone for anything. I've just not been brought up like that.

The press concentrates on a divorce an actor's going through and they ignore the good performances he gives, or the causes that he works for.