What has no shadow has no strength to live.

It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?

Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.

I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy

The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.

We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.

Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it. It puts what should be above things as they are. It does not know Jew from Greek nor slave from master.