God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left...

The people of Tlön are taught that the act of counting modifies the amount counted, turning indefinites into definites. The fact that several persons counting the same quantity come to the same result is for the psychologists of Tlön an example of the association of ideas or of memorization.