History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.

Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.