A fortified town is like a man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his business.

If the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal - that is your success.

Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their beans.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven?

I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.