I did not know then what Brother William was seeking, and to tell the truth, I still do not know today, and I presume he himself did not know, moved as he was solely by the desire for truth, and by the suspicion – which I could see he always harbored – that the truth...

National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.

There, Master Niketas,’ Baudolino said, ‘when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. A bit with the help of wine, and a bit with that of the green honey. There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,’ he said, ‘to forget the painful one...

The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.

Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed.There is no set of rules,...

But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.

And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?

The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on...

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.

But this lump does not absolve me, because I got it through heedlessness, not though courage. I run my tongue over my lip and what do I do? I write. But bad literature brings no redemption.

And don’t succumb too much to the spell of these cases. I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord’s torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest.”Master!’ I said, shocked.’So it is, Adso. And there are...

The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.

Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it’s real and you’re not to blame.

At t de mare e puterea adevărului care, precum binele, se răsp ndește de la sine.

El diablo no es el príncipe de la materia, el diablo es la arrogancia del espíritu, la fe sin sonrisa, la verdad jamás tocada por la duda.

The fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their conditions. Otherwise, why would you be recompensed with hell?

Kada policijos informatorius tampa išties patikimas? Kai atskleidžia sąmokslą. Tad reikia surengti sąmokslą, apie kurį galėtų pranešti.

Priešas turi būti atpažįstamas ir baisus, jis turi būti tavo namuose arba prie durų slenksčio. Štai kodėl žydai. Mums juos atsiuntė Dievo apvaizda, tad, dėl Dievo, pasinaudokime jais ir melskimės, kad visada būtų žydų, kurių galėtume bijoti ir nekęsti. Priešo reikia, kad tauta turėtų viltį. Sakoma, patriotizmas – paskutinė niekšų prieglauda: neturintis moralės principų dažniausiai...

In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

A te închipui un element necesar în ordinea universului echivalează, pentru noi, oamenii cu lecturi serioase, cu ceea ce e superstiția pentru analfabeți. Nu se schimbă lumea cu ideile. Persoanele cu puține idei sunt mai puțin supuse erorii, se iau după ceea ce fac toți și nu deranjează pe nimeni, și reușesc, se îmbogățesc, ajung...

But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects.

If two things don’t fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that’s credulity

What model reader did I want as i was writing? An accomplice, to be sure, one who would play my game.

Yes, I know, it’s not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.

Omnia mundi creaturaquasi liber et pictura nobis estin speculum.

In the United States there’s a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.

In this universe of ours, with its wealth of errors and legends, historical data and false information, one absolute truth is the fact that Superman is Clark Kent. All the rest is always open to debate.

Die Menschen tun das Böse nie so vollständig und begeistert, wie wenn sie es aus religiöser Überzeugung tun.

If you could decide on characters’ destinies it would be like going to the desk of a travel agent who says: “So where do you want to find the whale, in Samoa or in the Aleutian Islands? And when? And do you want to be the one who kills it or let Queequeg do it?...

outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities” but we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign. Excluded as they were from the flock, all of them were ready to hear, or to produce, every sermon...

Rzeczywiście, często się zdarza, że idzie się do biblioteki, bo chce się książkę o znanym tytule, ale główną funkcją biblioteki, a przynajmniej funkcją biblioteki w moim domu i w domach wszystkich znajomych, jakich możemy odwiedzać, jest odkrywanie książek, których istnienia się nie podejrzewało, a które, jak się okazuje, są dla nas niezwykle ważne.

Is it possible to say “It was a beautiful morning at the end of November” without feeling like Snoopy?

Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.(Casablanca, or, The Clichés Are Having a Ball)

He is always on the brink of suicide… because he seeks salvation through the routine formulas suggested to him by the society in which he lives.

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

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.

How peaceful life would be without Love, Adso. How Safe. How Tranquil. And how Dull.

The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.

… luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

But is the unicorn a falsehood? It’s the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as...

I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can’t disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are...

And in that moment I experience a revelation.I realize now that it was a painful sense that the world is purposeless, the lazy fruit of a misunderstanding, but in that moment I was able to translate what I felt only as: “God does not exist.

The light in her eyes was beyond description, yet it did not instill improper thoughts: it inspired a love tempered by awe, purifying the hearts it inflamed.

From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola

Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media.Well, it’s all over. We have to start again...

For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying ‘lepers’ we would understand ‘outcast, poor, simple, excluded,...

There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell....

Then why do you want to know?””Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.

But why do some people support [the heretics]?” “Because it serves their purposes, which concern the faith rarely, and more often the conquest of power.” “Is that why the church of Rome accuses all its adversaries of heresy?” “That is why, and that is also why it recognizes as orthodoxy any heresy it can bring...