Were modern cities only beautiful after darkness hid everything but their lights?

At twenty your choices are almost unlimited. At fifty you're a prisoner of past decisions. At seventy you have no free will left at all.

what you fear, you invite.

the unconscious forces that govern accessible memory are the most arbitrary of editors and the absolute masters of our lives.

Even a small, everyday lie is a clue to the personality and preoccupations of the liar, like a dream or any other confection of the mind, that is half-conscious and half-unconscious, as all creative acts must be.

Civilization is a fiction which becomes a fact only as long as everyone can believe in it. It is the cynic, rather than the rebel, who pulls down the whole flimsy structure periodically throughout history.

the fool is the one true cosmopolite - the one character common to all nationalities.