Quotes from Roberto Calasso

Education is paradoxical in that it is largely composed of things that cannot be learned

The monster does not need the hero. it is the hero who needs him for his very existence. When the hero confronts the monster, he has yet neither power nor knowledge, the monster is his secret father who will invest him with a power and knowledge that can belong to one man only, and that only the monster can give.

The gods are fugitive guests of literature.

Whatever else it might be, the divine is certainly the thing that imposes with maximum intensity the sensation of being alive.

They had to stir the churn of the ocean, until the soma floated up, as butter floats from milk. And this task could not be undertaken in opposition to the Asuras, but only with their help. The pronouncement ran contrary to everything the Devas had previously thought. But in the end, what did they have to lose, given that their lives were so futile? Now they thought: Anything, so long as there be a trial, a risk, a task.

Zeus is never ridiculous. Because his dignity is of no concern to him.

All of this follows from a time in history when procedures have taken command over rituals. A moment that is elusive, hard to establish, since the two powers also have features in common. First of all, they are both formalized actions. But they aim in opposite directions. Ritual aims toward perfect awareness, which for Catholics is the moment of transubstantiation. Procedures, on the other hand, point toward total automatism. The more procedures multiply, the more the realm of automata expands.

As the Greeks see it, elegance arises from excavation, from the cavity.

ogni vero editore compone, senza saperlo o anche sapendolo, un unico libro formato da tutti i libri che pubblica

Baudelaire was far more than a great poet. He established the keyboard of a sensibility that still lives within us, if we are not total brutes.

ardor which is tapas; the name Indra

The biggest danger in life is that the food of humans is all made of souls.

Mythical figures live many lives, die many deaths, and in this they differ from the characters we find in novels, who can never go beyond the single gesture. But in each of these lives and deaths all the others are present, and we can hear their echo. Only when we become aware of a sudden consistency between incompatibles can we say we have crossed the threshold of myth.

Mostrare la propria libreria è come far entrare un estraneo nell'intimità. È come raccontare dei propri flirt. Una cosa da evitare.

Sacrifice requires perfect awareness of destruction: if this clear-sighted attention is missing, there is no sacrifice. For technology it's enough to justify with claims about its practical utility.

The wild animal loves pure men because those men, at one time, were themselves prey.

El lector verdadero está siempre leyendo un libro -o dos, o tres o diez- y la novedad llega como una molestia -a veces irritante, a veces agradable, a veces incluso deseada- en el seno de esa actividad ininterrumpida. Donde, no sin esfuerzo, deberá conquistar un espacio, si no cae antes de las manos del lector. Este, entonces, volverá felizmente a ese otro libro que estaba leyendo porque eso es precisamente lo que tenía ganas de hacer.

Hay títulos que uno ha evitado durante años y años, viéndolos reaparecer cada tanto. Llega un día en que, sin una razón aparente, nos aventuramos a comprar el libro. Finalmente uno lo abre y descubre que es del todo distinto de lo que habíamos pensado. O bien se constata que es como si ya lo hubiéramos leído -y entonces las razones para evitarlo eran incuestionablemente sólidas.

Pure is that which stands out against a background, which has a profile, which can thus become a target.

Contact with the skin of a dead animal made it possible to communicate with all other animal species. It was the lingua franca of metamorphosis.

To his foreign guests, Vasi??ha said: "You have entered a place where amazement is vain. Everything is normal here. There are fathers who are sons of their sons or sons who are fathers of their fathers and their sisters, who are their lovers and wives too. Here the latter-day priest is also among the first of the gods. Here the monster is an ascetic and the ascetics fight the monsters.

A life in which the gods are not invited is not worth living. It will be quieter, but there won't be any stories.

That something merely happens is pointless. But that something happens and a watching eye gathers it into itself is everything.

One operates on the mind with the mind. What else is there, after all?