It may seem paradoxical to say that we have been expelled from the present, but it is a feeling we have all had at some moment. Some of us experienced it first as a condemnation, later transformed into consciousness and action. The search for the present is neither the pursuit of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is the search for a real reality.

To love is to undress our names.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.