Ancient Agora, Athens, Greece - 20071. "Between what I see and what I say
Between what I say and what I keep silent
Between what I keep silent and what I dream
Between what I dream and what I forget:
Poetry."
2. "Believing ourselves to be possessors of absolute truth degrades us: we regard every person whose way of thinking is different from ours as a monster and a threat and by so doing turn our own selves into monsters and threats to our fellows."
3. “Every moment is nothing without end.”
4. “I am a man: little do I last / and the night is enormous. / But I look up: / the stars write. / Unknowing I understand: / I too am written, / and at this very moment / someone spells me out.”
5. “If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.”
6. "I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
7. “Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.”
8. "Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual."
9. “Love is one of the answers humankind invented to stare death in the face: time ceases to be a measure, and we can briefly know paradise.”
10. “Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.”
11. "Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past."
12. "Memory is not what we remember, but that which remembers us. Memory is a present that never stops passing."
13. "Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason."
14. "Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
15. “Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move, today is today, always today.”
16. "Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies not only in the fact that it is the most perfect expression of the will to power... but also in the fact that it lacks meaning."
17. “Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.”
18. “To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.”
19. "What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions; life is plurality, death is uniformity."
20. "Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two."
