I have nothing to tell except travellers' stories, which are always tiresome, like the description of a play which was very exciting to those who saw it.

Well, I aren't like a bird-clapper, forced to make a rattle when the wind blows on me. I can keep my own counsel when there's no good i' speaking.

There is no short-cut no patent tram-road, to wisdom. After all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness which must still be trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

We cannot reform our forefathers.

There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good.

History, we know, is apt to repeat itself.