Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.

I have never seen an ass who talked like a human being, but I have met many human beings who talked like asses.

Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle.

A blaspheming Frenchman is a spectacle more pleasing to the Lord than a praying Englishman.

The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather- beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.

Matrimony; the high sea for which no compass has yet been invented.

Where books are burned in the end people will be burned too.