Lully's machine, Mill's fear and Lasswitz's chaotic library can be the subject of jokes, but they exaggerate a propensity which is common: making metaphysics and the arts into a kind of play with combinations.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters.

We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

I'm not interested in the fact that a writer may label himself as being intellectual or anti-intellectual. l'm really interested in the stuff he's turning out.

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.