Quotes

It was strange how both realms bordered on each other, how close together they were! For example, when Lina, our servant girl, sat with us by the living-room door at evening prayers and added her clear voice to the hymn, her washed hands folded on her smoothed-down apron, she belonged with father and mother, to us, to those that dwelled in light and righteousness. But

The sweetness of many things from that time still stirs and touches me with melancholy: dark and well-lighted alleys, houses and towers, chimes and faces, rooms rich and comfortable, warm and relaxed, rooms pregnant with secrets. Everything bears the scent of warm intimacy, servant girls, household remedies, and dried fruits.

I shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town's Latin school.

I suddenly found myself disentangled from the demonic snares, I saw the world before me bright and joyous once more, I was no longer subject to anxiety attacks and heart palpitations that choked me. The spell was broken, I was no longer a lost soul in torment, I was once again a schoolboy as always.

Only the thoughts that we live out have any value.

Everyone lives through this difficult period. For the average person it’s the point in his life when the demands of his own life clash most violently with the world around him, when his forward path must be fought for most bitterly.

We can understand one another, but each of us can only interpret himself.

Oh, I know it today: nothing in the world is more repugnant to a man than following the path that leads him to himself!

I know that many people won’t believe that a child not yet eleven is capable of such feelings. It is not to those people that I am telling my story. I’m telling it to those who have greater knowledge of humanity. An adult who has learned how to transform part of his emotions into thought processes notices that such thoughts aren’t present in a child, and then concludes that the experiences aren’t present, either. But only seldom in my life have I had such deep and painful experiences as I had then.

I often ardently perceived a longing for relief, the desire for a proper confession, but I also felt in advance that I would be unable to tell and explain things correctly to either my father or mother. I knew that they would receive my words amicably, they would carefully spare my feelings, in fact, pity me, but they wouldn’t fully understand me, and the whole thing would be looked on as a sort of minor infraction, whereas it was actually my fate.

We can understand one another, but each of us can only interpret himself.

Every person’s life is a journey toward himself,

Two worlds coincided there, day and night issued from two poles.

I recommend all adventurous youths who abandon vessels in romantic islands during the rainy season to provide themselves with umbrellas.

Were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.

Nature is nobody's ally.

Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.

Youth is the time when hearts are large.

War being the greatest of evils, all its accessories necessarily partake of the same character.

The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!