Distraction is our habitual state. Not the distraction of the person who withdraws from the world in order to shut himself up in the secret and ever-changing land of his fantasy, but the distraction of the person who is always outside himself, lost in the trivial, senseless, turmoil of everyday life.

Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life

Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind.

Believing ourselves to be possessors of absolute truth degrades us: we regard every person whose way of thinking is different from ours as a monster and a threat and by so doing turn our own selves into monsters and threats to our fellows.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

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

A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.