“recognize the evidence through which the world speaks to us like a great book...”

“Books always speak of other books.”

“There, I said to myself, are the reasons for the silence and darkness that surround the library: it is the preserve of learning but can maintain this learning unsullied only if it prevents its reaching anyone at all, even the monks themselves. Learning is not like a coin, which remains whole even through the most infamous transactions; it is, rather, like a very handsome dress, which is worn out through use and ostentation. Is not a book like that, in fact?”

“Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.”

“the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life.”

“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.”

“Jedes Geschöpf der Welt ist uns gleichsam ein Buch und Gemälde und Spiegel. (Every creature of the world is to us at once a book and painting and mirror.)”