The mobile phone... is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.

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.

True education does not fill our minds with facts but teach us how to think to gain wisdom.

In person, my father is so friendly, so considerate, so funny, and so real. I have admired my father all of my life, and I love him with all my heart.

How can there ever possibly be a conflict between my private interests and the public good?

I'm romantically inclined. No human being on Earth is not attracted to other people. There is no fairy tale that they only have eyes for you. You just choose to act on it or not.

Nothing can take the sting out of the world’s economic problems like watching millionaires present each other with golden statues.

It is love which made all this. War which protects it. With love comes responsibility and possibility, fear and hopes, quests and suffering.

I would not despair unless I knew the irrevocable decree was passed; saw my misfortune recorded in the book of fate, and signed and sealed by neces-sity.

Miracles happen. But prayer is needed! Prayer that is courageous, struggling and persevering, not prayer that is a mere formality.

Whatever's most important to you is your god. If it's not the Rock Christ Jesus, then it's sand!

American audiences don't react in the same way as European ones to African music because, I think, Europeans listen to this music through all the festivals that exist here.