Calasso's Quotes

#1. Roberto Calasso's survey of the renewed interest in myth demonstrates how decisive the gods' influence was on modern literature. Calasso is not only immensely learned; he is one of the most original thinkers and writers we have today.

Charles Simic

#2. In marriage, God rarely starts with the issues on the table. He starts with the ones in our hearts

Ngina Otiende

#3. The gods are fugitive guests of literature.

Roberto Calasso

#4. Praise without merit is more harmful than unearned criticism.

Roger Ebert

#5. We establish a connection with the unknown through the act of giving something and, paradoxically, the act of destroying something. That is what is behind sacrifice. What you offer and what you destroy, it is that surplus which is life itself.

Roberto Calasso

#6. Normally, it's one or the other - a pretty, straight woman or a more charactery woman who isn't supposed to be attractive. But women like Tina Fey are leading the charge on being both. You can be funny and attractive.

Becki Newton

#7. If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.

Flannery O'Connor

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

Roberto Calasso

#9. Stories never live alone; They are the branches of a family that we have to trace back, and forward.

Roberto Calasso

#10. If ideas and beliefs are to be denied validity outside the geographical and cultural bounds of their origin, Buddhism would be confined to north India, Christianity to a narrow tract in the Middle East and Islam to Arabia.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#11. Myth is never a single story. It is always a tree with many branches.

Roberto Calasso

#12. Behave like the flower; it blooms with its own petals without bothering to take the colour of another flower's petals. You can excel with what you have!

Israelmore Ayivor

#13. You don't need eyes to see, you need vision.

Maxwell Frazer

#14. To me, Cary Grant is probably the most fashionable man in the history of Hollywood. The guy was just slick. He did it so effortlessly.

Reid Scott

#15. The author is the successor of the saint, everyone respects the author.

Roberto Calasso

#16. ardor which is tapas; the name Indra

Roberto Calasso

#17. The belief that the soul continues its existence after the dissolution of the body is a matter of philosophical or theological speculation rather than of simple faith, and is accordingly nowhere expressly taught in Holy Scripture

James H. Cone

#18. We don't experience our professional and personal lives as separate worlds; they are intertwined and holistic.

Tom Hayes

#19. [Fidel Castro] has a very good [human rights] record.

Oliver Stone

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

Roberto Calasso

#21. Even to current-events junkies, the notion of a 24-hour news channel sounded like a gimmick when the Cable News Network launched more than 30 years ago.

Steve Erickson

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

Roberto Calasso

#23. That would be a first. I'm the son of Hades, Jason. I might as well be covered in blood or sewage, the way people treat me. I don't belong anywhere. I'm not even from this century. But even that's not enough to set me apart. I've got to be - to be -

Rick Riordan

#24. We are the Captains of Spaceship Earth ... we have the capacity to overcome our limits.

Jason Silva

#25. 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.

Roberto Calasso

#26. Ever since Adam's day, the divine law of the Sabbath has been emphasized repeatedly over the centuries more than any other commandment. This long emphasis alone is an indication of its importance.

James E. Faust