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I'm practically broke and homeless.
This fatal city, Antioch,
has devoured all my money:
this fatal city with its extravagant life.

— Constantine P. Cavafy To Have Taken The Trouble (1930)

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More quotes by Constantine P. Cavafy

People of Kommagini, let the glory of Antiochos,
the noble king, be celebrated as it deserves.

You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.

When setting out upon your way to Ithaca,
wish always that your course be long,
full of adventure, full of lore.

Don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive — don’t mourn them uselessly.

Collected Poems (1992)

Later, in a more perfect society,
someone else made just like me
is certain to appear and act freely.

Collected Poems (1992)

All Constantine P. Cavafy quotes →

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Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

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Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Constantine P. Cavafy (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.