Your masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart!

The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell - in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond.

We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.

There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries.

There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven't read, that we haven't had the time to read.

Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country

The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered.