Echoes

He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.

Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else.

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life. This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.

From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.

I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn't like.

We live in a world that is lit by lightning. So much is changing and will change, but so much endures and transcends time.

Tell me with whom you consort and I will tell you who you are; if I know how you spend your time, then I know what might become of you.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.

He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

Born under another sky, placed in the middle of an always-moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which sweeps along everything that surrounds him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything; he grows accustomed to naught but change, and concludes by viewing it as the natural state of man; he feels a need for it; even more, he loves it: for instability, instead of occurring to him in the form of disasters, seems to give birth to nothing around him but wonders...

Do this, my dear Lucilius: claim yourself for yourself; gather and save the time which until now was either being taken from you or stolen from you or simply slipping away.

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book — a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Year after year, on the monkey's face — a monkey's mask.

"We know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things." So said the ready-voiced daughters of great Zeus, and they breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things there were aforetime.

A man must shape himself to a new mark when the old one goes to ground.

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.

I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

Traveling — it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.

Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die.

Ah! Sun-flower, weary of time, / Who countest the steps of the Sun, / Seeking after that sweet golden clime / Where the traveller's journey is done.