Loyalty, Signor Molteni, not love. Penelope is loyal to Ulysses but we do not know how far she loved him...and as you know people can sometimes be absolutely loyal without loving. In certain cases, in fact, loyalty is form of vengeance, of black-mail, of recovering one's self-respect. Loyalty, not love.

I like to compare my method with that of painters centuries ago, proceeding from layer to layer.

The less one notices happiness, the greater it is.

An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity.

In life there are no problems, that is, objective and external choices; there is only the life which we do not resolve as a problem but which we live as an experience, whatever the final result may be.

Dictatorships are one-way streets. Democracy boasts two-way traffic.

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.