"Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world."
Rome quotes
Rome
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Rome quotes (page 5 of 24)
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"The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew: The conscious stone to beauty grew."
"I was born in London and raised in Rome until I was 4. Then we went back to London, where I went to school."
"In Job and the Psalms we shall find more sublime ideas, more elevated language, than in any of the heathen versifiers of Greece or Rome."
"Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became serious, was inner go. Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding on. Security was the watchword – as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks"
"When Rome burned, the emperor's cats still expected to be fed on time."
"It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most. It is older than the oldest speech of Rome. This is the tragic accent of the scene."
"These cardinals trifle with me; I abhor; This dilatory sloth and tricks of Rome."
"When in Rome, you must do as the Romans do and accept the local customs, if they are not immoral."
"I lived in Rome for about five or six months during Life Aquatic."
"In Rome people spend most of their time having lunch. And they do it very well - Rome is unquestionably the lunch capital of the world."
"I have a multivolume history of the world from the 19th century that begins with Noah's flood as though it's as historical a fact as the rise and fall of Rome."
"If some lose their whole fortunes, they will drag many more down with them . . . believe me that the whole system of credit and finance which is carried on here at Rome in the Forum, is inextricably bound up with the revenues of the Asiatic province. If Those revenues are destroyed, our whole system of credit will come down with a crash."
"Those have not lived who have not seen Rome."
"The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction."
"What is there in Rome for me to see that others have not seen before me? What is there for me to touch that others have not touched? What is there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it pass to others? What can I discover?--Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. One charm of travel dies here."
"Evil, what is evil? There is only one evil, to deny life As Rome denied Etruria And mechanical America Montezuma still"
"Washington, D.C., has everything that Rome, Paris and London have in the way of great architecture - great power bases. Washington has obelisks and pyramids and underground tunnels and great art and a whole shadow world that we really don't see."
"If there is one lesson Rome teaches, it is that matter is good; in Rome the holy and the homely rise and converge."
"One can be tired of Rome after three weeks and feel one has exhausted it; after three months one feels that one has not even scratched the surface of Rome; and after six months one wishes never to leave it."