Memoirs of Hadrian

self-and-identity

• I desired that my prestige should be my own, inseparable from my person… I had enough to do to become, or merely to be, Hadrian to the utmost.

  MH-RC-076

• I have never been able to understand how one could have enough of any beloved… my loves have left me more often than I have left them.

  MH-RC-013

mortality

• Experiences of pure sleep and pure awakening which border on death and resurrection… one tasted, as it were, the very essence of being through the closed eyelids.

  MH-RC-015

• That daily miracle which I never have contemplated without some secret cry of joy… for the briefest moment the man who prays on that peak is sole beneficiary of the morning.

  YOUR-MOH-RC-131

work-as-meaning

• Order on the frontiers was nothing if I could not persuade a Jewish peddler and a Greek grocer to live peaceably side by side. Peace was my aim.

  MH-RC-071

• We emperors are not Caesars; we are functionaries of the State… that plaintiff whom I refused to hear was right when she exclaimed that if I had no time to listen, I had no time to rule.

  MH-RC-088