“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”

“A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realize that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his vices as well as his virtues.”

“There is no harm in our criticizing foreigners, if only we would also criticize ourselves. In other words, the world might need even less of its new charity, if it had a little more of the old humility.”

“People, if you have any prayers,Say prayers for me:And lay me under a Christian stoneIn that lost land I thought my own,To wait till the holy horn is blown,And all poor men are free.”

“Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.”

“They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors. They distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity. Only they always speak of humanity as if it were a curious foreign nation. They are dividing themselves more and more from men to exalt the strange race of mankind. They are ceasing to be human in the effort to be humane.”

“And he set to rhyme his ale-measures,And he sang aloud his laws,Because of the joy of giants,The joy without a cause.”