“Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.”

Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs.

Your trouble’s easy borne when everybody gives it a lift for you.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

Justice is like the kingdom of God–it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.

If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

Hold up your head! You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence.

Any coward can fight a battle when he’s sure of winning; but give me the man who has the pluck to fight when he’s sure of losing.

We have had an unspeakably delightful journey, one of those journeys which seem to divide one’s life in two, by the new ideas they suggest and the new views of interest they open.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

Souls live on in perpetual echoes.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it.

The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.

These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.

… it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.

And I’ve discovered a strikingly consistent pattern: grit and age go hand in hand. Sixty-somethings tend to be grittier, on average, than fifty-somethings, who are in turn grittier than forty-somethings, and so on.

I grew up in the inner city of Chicago, and then I moved to Robbins, and it kind of raised me.

The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival.

This city, all they want us to be is ourselves. You love us how we are. We’re all a work in progress as men and you still love us and I thank you so much for embracing us.

Paris is a city of centralisation–and centralisation and classification are closely allied. In the early times, when centralisation is becoming a fact, its forerunner is classification. All things which are similar or analogous become grouped together, and from the grouping of groups rises one whole or central point.

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter.

Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.