Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.

Everything is repeated, in a circle. History is a master because it teaches us that it doesn't exist. It's the permutations that matter.

Monks were rich in interior life and very dirty, because the body, protected by a habit that, ennobling it, released it, was free to think, and to forget about itself. The idea was not only ecclesiastic; you have to think only of the beautiful mandes Erasmus wore. And when even the intellectual must dress in lay armor (wigs, waistcoats, knee breeches) we see that when he retires to think, he swaggers in rich dressing-gowns, or in Balzac’s loose, drôlatique blouses. Thought abhors tights.

God is pure nothingness, touched by neither Now nor Here. The Name of The Rose

But I must hope that books possess a life of a more varied kind than their authors' myopia concedes to them. A book is a kind of of machine which the reader can freely use as a generator of intellectual stimulation. It is enough that the book should be truly a machine for thinking, that it should generate a variety of possible conclusions without its author's ordaining and limiting them in advance.

Affected as they are by a constitutive solipsism, philosophies can say everything about the worldthey design and very little about the world they help to construct.

Symbol sometimes of the Devil,sometimes of the Risen Christ, no animal is more untrustworthy than the cock.

There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.