Those who love, friends and lovers, know that love is not only a blinding flash, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation.

I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.

In our society, any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death.

stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves

The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.

For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.

... We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.