When you set out on your journey to Ithaca, pray that the road is long, full of adventure, full of knowledge.

I'm practically broke and homeless. This fatal city, Antioch, has devoured all my money: this fatal city with its extravagant life.

To certain people there comes a day when they must say the great Yes or the great No.

He wasn't completely wrong, poor old Gemistus (let Lord Andronicus and the patriarch suspect him if they like), in wanting us, telling us to become pagan once again.

What shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.

Nero wasn't worried at all when he heard the utterance of the Delphic Oracle: "Beware the age of seventy-three." Plenty of time to enjoy himself still. He's thirty. The deadline the god has given him is quite enough to cope with future dangers.

From all I did and all I said let no one try to find out who I was.