The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

Long after you’ve forgotten someone’s voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body.

The truth doesn't care what we think of it.

No one is born just once. If you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's arms; or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull.

Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.

If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.

Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!

It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.

I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.

Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.

In your promises cleave to what is right, And you will be able to fulfill your word.

Impermanence is not something to be afraid of. It's the evolution, a never-ending horizon.

Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.

Fight fairly. Give generously. Laugh loudly. Love deeply.

A human life is a story told by God.

Celebrity culture is an aspirational culture regardless of how much you don't want it to be.

Anti-intellectualism is a disposition to discount the importance of truth and the life of the mind.

What's difficult to understand about German opera? It's always the same. Boy meets girl, boy falls in love, girl gets devoured by horrible winged creature with claws.

Doors open because you're beautiful, but I wouldn't cultivate beauty to the exclusion of brains.

And "withdrawal from the world" is nothing but the destruction of passions and manifestation of the innermost life in Christ.