To penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery-back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness.

For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time.

Pure morality is only an instinctive adjustment which the soul makes.

[Hawthorne''s] pious blame is a chuckle of praise all the while.

Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.

There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.