But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monk toward the end of the fourteenth century...First of all, what style should I employ?

Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.

We live for books.

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

And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?

Being a professional philosopher is, I would say, feeling natural to think about small and great problems. It is the only pleasure.