The name of the rose

Shapes, of things and animals, seemed to rise suddenly from the void; people materialized from the mist, first gray, like ghosts, then gradually though not easily recognizable

The fog of the previous day was now a milky blanket that totally covered the high plain

For every person, when questioned, usually tells the inquisitor, out of fear of being suspected of something, whatever may serve to make somebody else suspect

“And is a library, then, an instrument not for distributing the truth but for delaying its appearance?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“Not always and not necessarily. In this case it is

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors

To know what one book says you must read others?”
“At times this can be so. Often books speak of other books. Often a harmless book is like a seed that will blossom into a dangerous book, or it is the other way around: it is the sweet fruit of a bitter stem

I lost myself in the contemplation of nature, trying to forget my thoughts and to look only at beings as they appear, and to forget myself, joyfully, in the sight of them

passions in themselves are not evil, but they must be governed by the will led by the rational soul

Now I know that I was suffering from the conflict between the illicit appetite of the intellect, in which the will’s rule should have been displayed, and the illicit appetite of the senses, subject to human passions

to my lips, about ecstatic rapture; I had read them in the books of Saint Hildegard: “The flame consists of a splendid clarity, of an unusual vigor, and of an igneous ardor, but possesses the splendid clarity that it may illuminate and the igneous ardor that it may burn.”