I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about?
It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.
The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
Poems are difficult to silence.
The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.
Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.
A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.
Libraries, museums, and schools are fragile institutions.
“Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.