Everything is change; and you cannot step twice into the same river.

In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.

How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?

There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.

At the stair-foot Hephaistion was waiting. He happened to be there, as he happened to have a ball handy if Alexander wanted a game, or water if he was thirsty; not by calculation, but in a constant awareness by which no smallest trifle was missed. Now, when he came down the stairs with a shut mouth and blue lines under his eyes, Hephaistion received some mute signal he understood, and fell into step beside him.

An audience of twenty thousand, sitting on its hands, could not have produced such an echoing silence.

It gives me no joy to be praised at the expense of a better artist, by someone who does not know the difference or who thinks me too vain to be aware of it myself.