I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'

As late as the seventeenth century, monarchs owned so little furniture that they had to travel from palace to palace with wagon-loads of plate and bedspreads, of carpets and tapestries.

Blood of the world, time staunchless flows; The wound is mortal and is mine.

The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.

The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace, The prurient ape's defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much.

Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.