165 quotes found
“Things, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies make us stop in wonder - and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man's or woman's death, unless th...”
“I do not know which of us has written this page.”
“But let no one imagine that we were mere ascetics. There is no more complex pleasure than thought, and it was to thought that we delivered ourselves over.”
“I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood.”
“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.”
“The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.”
“So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling awayand everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.”
“Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.”
“If we think of the novel and the epic...The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero--a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the ess...”
“I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.”
“Lost in these imaginary illusions I forgot my destiny that of the hunted.”
“It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.”
“There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.”
“God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and he understood the reasons, and accepted his destiny; but when he awoke there was only a dark resignation, a valiant ignorance, for the mach...”
“I carried out my plan because I felt The Chief had some fear of those of my race, of those uncountable forebears whose culmination lies in me. I wished to prove to him that a yellow man could save ...”
“He [Omar Khayyam] is an atheist, but knows how to interpret in orthodox style the most difficult passages of the Koran; for every educated man is a theologian and faith is not a requisite.”
“The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking...”
“Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.”
“If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.”
“There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others.I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.”
