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"If one starts to draw comparisons between what is and what is not, it is the poorer qualities of the former that strike you, the impurities, the flaws; in short, you can only really feel safe with nothingness."
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"The world will see true peace when there are no boundaries of religion and the religion of all will be pure unconditional love."
"The Bible warns [parents] against extremes in dealing with our adult children. It tells us to avoid trying to control [them] once they become adults. When children become independent, a major transition takes place: They are no longer under our authority."
"This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself."
"I am engaged in spiritual warfare every day. I must never let down my guard-I must keep armed."
"Who gave fire permission to burn?"
"Thinking doesn't pay. Just makes you discontented with what you see around you."
"But if I feel, may I never express? "Never! declared Reason.I groaned under her bitter sternness. Never - never - oh, hard word! This hag, this Reason, would not let me look up, or smile, or hope; she could not rest unless I were altogether crushed, cowed, broken-in, and broken down. According to her, I was born only to work for a piece of bread, to await the pains of death, and steadily through all life to despond. Reason might be right; yet no wonder we are glad at times to defy her, to rush from under her rod and give a truant hour to Imagination - her soft, bright foe, our sweet Help, our divine Hope."
"Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two-existence and consciousness-are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end."
"...because wherever else the future leads, it leads ultimately to death, the end that is present in my beginning and in yours."
"Why is it that the cross has become the symbol of Christianity? It is because at the cross Jesus purchased our redemptionand provided a righteousness which we could not ourselves earn."
Explore more quotes by Italo Calvino
"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Tell the others right away, 'No, I don't want to watch TV! I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!"
"Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification."
"I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called 'I' and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only 'station' and beyond it there exists nothing except the unanswered signal of a telephone ringing in a dark room of a distant city."
"Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. or to the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx."
"I'm accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology."
"But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. 'I like to know that book exists that I will still be able to read she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?"
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