it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.

The perennial wonder of Venice is to peer at herself in her canals and find that she exists-incredible as it seems. It is the same reassurance that a looking-glass offers us: the guarantee that we are real.

love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.

Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.

Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state.

Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made men feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the universe.

Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.