It is strange how the elderly fall silent when they ought to go on speaking, obliging the young to learn everything from scratch.

We say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one's courage in both hands, a phenomenon that has only been observed in the human species.

blindness is a private matter between a person and the eyes with which he or she was born.

I always ask two questions: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases?

The only miracle we can perform is to go on living, said the woman, to preserve the fragility of life from day to day, as if it were blind and did not know where to go, and perhaps it is like that, perhaps it really does not know, it placed itself in our hands, after giving us intelligence.

The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write.

but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probably, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt.