Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.

All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy?

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.

Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish.