Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.

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.

I have learned that to have a good friend is the purest of all God's gifts for it is a love that has no exchange of payment.

You cannot know what you cannot feel.

Those clouds are angels' robes.

The very poor are strictly materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic.

I always push forward. It doesn't mean that I'll be perfect. I make mistakes -- but I learn from my mistakes, and move on.

Enlightenment is simply sanity~ the sanity in which I see my real situation in the living fabric of all that exists.

To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.

An open, competitive, and liberalized financial market can effectively allocate scarce resources in a manner that promotes stability and prosperity far better than governmental intervention.

Am I now ready to make some changes.

As soon as I step on that stage, nothing matters. I don't think of it as work. It's just so much fun.