The good Lord sees your heart, not the braid on your jacket, before Him we are all in our birthday suits, generals and common men alike.

Knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.

Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.

What the collectivist age wants, allows, and approves is the perpetual holiday from the self.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous-to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

A human being tends to believe that the mood of the moment, be it troubled or blithe, peaceful or stormy, is the true, native, and permanent tenor of his existence ... whereas the truth is that he is condemned to improvisation and morally lives from hand to mouth all the time.

When one day is like all the others, then they are all like one; complete uniformity would make the longest life seem short, and as though it had stolen away from us unawares.

Is there anyone but must repress a secret thrill, on arriving in Venice for the first time-or returning thither after long absence-and stepping into a Venetian gondola?

Looking, he thought that to come to Venice by the station is like entering a palace by the back door.