I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am, unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied ... In spite of everything I survive.

Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political instrument.

Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably.

For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.

Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.