Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.

A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.

Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.

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

The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world.

The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that - how to express this - you really must make the self.