The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.

Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.

Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.

If Bush had read all the documents about the Russians and British in Afghanistan in the 19th century, he would have not done what he did in the 21st. He would have understood how difficult it was to control this territory. He probably didn't read them.

It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.

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

Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale.