“There are no original ideas. There are only original people.”

To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals — and critics of the Women’s Movement.

To surrender one’s vulnerable body to water has always seemed to me a limpid act of will that has no coutnerpart or equal, unless it is sex.

All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.

My mother was my first jealous lover.

Weather creates character.

Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.

I love medieval cities; they do not clamor for attention; they possess their souls – their riches – in quiet; formal, courteous, they reveal themselves slowly, stone by stone, garden by garden; hidden treasures wait calmly to be loved and yield to introspective wandering.

If there is one lesson Rome teaches, it is that matter is good; in Rome the holy and the homely rise and converge.

Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.

Insanity is a lack of proportion.

The past can be tamed and controlled.

Every generation reinvents the wheel – and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman’s burdens.

Italy offers one the most priceless of all one’s possessions – one’s own soul.

Sometimes I think that just not thinking of oneself is a form of prayer. . .

Oratory is good only if it has the qualities of fitness for the occasion, propriety of style, and originality of treatment, while in the case of letters there is no such need whatsoever.

Wish to be what you are, and wish for no other position.

The ultimate truth is so simple; it is nothing more than being in one’s natural, original state.

Of course quality is important but is it not the quality of an individual’s originality that is most important?

Sovereignty is easily preserved by the very arts by which it was originally created. When, however, energy has given place to indifference, and temperance and justice to passion and arrogance, then as the morals change so changes fortune.

Those who seek to satisfy the mind of man by hampering it with ceremonies and music and affecting charity and devotion have lost their original nature.

If it does, the fruit will not be as good as it was in its original place. This is a rule of nature. I think if I had left my country, I would be the same as the tree.

Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.