The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.

Were a man to spend only one day in Sicily and ask, "What must one see?" I would answer him without hesitation, "Taormina." It is only a landscape, but a landscape where you find everything on earth that seems made to seduce the eyes, the mind and the imagination.

Travel, like dreams, is a door that opens from the real world into a world that is yet to be discovered

...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.

She was the temptress who had ensnared the first man, and who still continued her work at damnation; she was the being who is feeble, dangerous, mysteriously troubling. And even more than her body of perdition, he hated her loving soul.