There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.

So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

We are artists. When we can’t find the beauty, we create it.

Tristan was the soundtrack of my summer. The beat I walked to. The melody I breathed in and out. The lyrics I lived by.

It takes courage to violate expectations, but sometimes the reward is a new level of success.

The Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean are a six-day boat ride from Madagascar, and their only inhabitants are French scientists.

An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.

As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.

The Art of Vermeer must have been there on the morning of creation.

There is one death bed repentance recorded in the Bible (the thief on the cross), so that no one despair, but there is ONLY one, so that no one will presume.

Wouldn't that be an amazing super power? Knowing where to press on someone's neck to make them immediately urinate.

It's a very complicated landscape and I don't think there's one easy answer about it [Edard Snowden movie].