The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

To be a European is to try to negotiate morally, intellectually and existentially the opposing statements and praxis of the city of Socrates and the city of Isaiah.

If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.

I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.

To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.