How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!

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.

We see what we want to see. We idealize each other with our own fantasies.

There is no collective thinking.

You only need one ray of light to chase all the shadows away.

Cancer is enough to get my attention.

The best and only authentic book written on the sixties underground.

The artist... may suppose that ideas are his chief currency; but unless he is also attuned to feelings, in life and in art, he will not move his fellow human beings.

It's as if someone vacuumed up the horizon while we were looking the other way.

During a speech on Sunday, President Obama said to the crowd, 'We've got to vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote.' This went on for an hour until someone finally fixed his teleprompter.

The world of sleep has an existence of its own.

The 'harmonious world' theory .. will help dispel doubts in the international community about China's continued development and refute the absurd 'China threat theory'.