I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

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Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

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

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The real hero is always a hero by mistake.

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When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

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We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.

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There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.

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Beauty is, in some way, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages... a beautiful object must always follow certain rules. A beautiful nose shouldn't be longer than that or shorter than that, on the contrary, an ugly nose can be as long as the one of Pinocchio, or as big as the trunk of an elephant, or like the beak of an eagle, and so ugliness is unpredictable, and offers an infinite range of possibility. Beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like God.

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The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come.

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Originality and creativity are nothing but the result of the wise management of combinations. The creative genius combines more rapidly, and with a greater critical sense of what gets tossed out and what gets saved, the same material that the failed genius has to work with.

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