The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.

We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.

If western culture is shown to be rich it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to "dissolve" harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.

How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.