It is our personal territoryterra nostra Quotes

“Since I neither want not can influence the events of the world, my mission is to preserve the internal integrity and equilibrium of my mind; that will be in which the manor in which I recover the purity of the original act; I shall be my own citadel, and to it I shall retire to protect myself against a hostile and corrupt world. I shall be my own citadel and, within it, my own and only citizen.”

“He himself felt defeated because he was fighting against something he did not hate, because he did not understand the fratricidal hatred between the sons of Araby and Israel, and because he loved and knew and appreciated and wanted to save the merits of their cultures, although not the cruelty of their powers; he knew and loved the fountains and the gardens and the patios and high towers of al-Andalus, the nature that has been made more beautiful by man for man's pleasure, not for his mortification.”

“all that was left to me was certain images and all of them spoke to me of the collapse of a cruel world and the slow construction in its stead of another world, equally cruel.”

“Power does not alter a man's character. It merely reveals it.”

“Don Quixote is not just Don Quixote”

“A person with no enemies is a person with no personality.”

“We can only become a better person if we have the inclination and the resolve, only if we accept that life is a learning curve and all experiences add something to our personality.”

“To understand what a person is, it is necessary always to refer to what he may be in the future, for every state of the person is pointed in the direction of future possibilities.”

“Everyone knows the experience of encountering other persons only under the aspect of how they intersect with our projects, and of noticing them only insofar as we have to notice them in order to interact with them as we pursue our goals. But from time to time we realize more keenly that the other with whom we are dealing is a person, and then we feel the irreverence and the arrogance of our attitude. We become aware of a certain violence with which we have been treating other persons; we realize that we have to draw back and grant them a space in which to be themselves as persons, and that we have to cease seeing them exclusively in relation to our projects.”