We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.

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.

If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil; never anticipate it.

The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.

You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.