The Lily and The Lion

First love is the only pure and happy one. If it goes wrong, nothing can replace it. Later loves can never attain to the same limpid perfection; though they may be as solid, as marble, they are streaked with veins of another colour, the dried blood of the past.

You know what the common people are like,’ said Artevelde; ‘they never know their own strength till the moment for using it has passed.

There are no advantageous defeats, but there can be disastrous victories.

The sun still beats down warmly over the Sienese countryside in September, and the stubble left by harvest covers the fields with a sort of animal fur. It is one of the most beautiful countrysides in the world: God has drawn the curve of its hills with an exquisite freedom, and has given it a rich and varied vegetation among which the cypresses stand out like lords. Man has worked this earth to advantage and has spread his dwellings over it; but from the most princely villa to the humbles cottage they all have a similar grace and harmony with their ochre walls and curved tiles. The road is never monotonous; it winds and rises, only to descend into another valley between terraced fields and age-old olive groves. Both God and man have shown their genius at Siena.

He was held in great respect. Who remembered now that he was a forger, a perjurer, a murderer and something of a sorcerer? Who would have dared remind him of it? He was Monseigneur Robert, a giant beginning to grow old but still possessed of surprising strength and immense self-assurance, who, invariably dressed in red, was leading an English army into France. Nor did it matter to him that his soldiers were foreigners. Indeed, this was not the sort of thing to which any count, baron or knight gave a thought. Their campaigns were family matters; their battles quarrels over inheritance; the enemy was a cousin, the ally another. It was to the population who would be massacred, whose houses would be burnt, barns looted and women raped, that the word foreigner meant enemy; not to the princes who were defending their titles and asserting their rights.

Peoples bear the weight of curses longer than the princes who incur them.

One has nothing to lose by defending one's rights, even if one knows one cannot succeed. But the future is long and lies in God's hands.

He felt vaguely troubled when he looked towards the centre of the Green, where the block usually stood. But you become accustomed to the nearness of death by a whole series of simple thoughts that add up in the end to no more than a weary melancholy. It occurred to Mortimer that the sly raven would live on after him, and would tease other prisoners; the rats, too, would go on living, those big wet rats that emerged at night from the muddy banks of the Thames to run about the stones of the fortress; and even the flea that was irritating him under his shirt would jump onto his executioner the day of his death and go on living. Every life that is wiped from the world leaves the other lives intact. There is nothing so ordinary as death.

Al perder un enemigo contra el que se ha luchado durante veinte años se experimenta una especie de vacío. El odio es un lazo muy fuerte que, al romperse, causa cierta melancolía”.

Power, without the consent of those over whom it is exercised, is a fraud that cannot long endure, a delicate balance between fear and rebellion, which may suddenly be overset when enough men become aware that they all think alike.

God does not need to intervene directly to punish perjury, and the heavens may remain dumb. The wicked bear within themselves the seeds of their own misfortunes.

Merely by living, man becomes degraded and loses in purity what he gains in power. However clear a spring may be, when it becomes a river it cannot help being polluted by mud and slime.

Litigation can become as great a passion as gambling.

We are all apt to fall into the error of assuming that other people think we are as important as we do ourselves; but unless there is some particular reason for their remembering it, others forget what has happened to us very quickly; and, even if they have not forgotten, their memories attach much less weight to it than we are inclined to believe.

Es error común de los humanos creer que el prójimo concede a su persona tanta importancia como cada uno se da a sí mismo; los demás, a no ser que tengan interés particular en el recuerdo, olvidan rápidamente lo que nos ha ocurrido, y si no lo han olvidado, su recuerdo no tiene la firmeza que imaginamos.