The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.

You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.

In general confusion youth recognizes itself and rejoices.

My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.