Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, 'No, there was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death.

It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.

She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.

Marriage had certain commercial advantages. By it the man secures the exclusive right to the woman's body and by it, the woman binds the man to support her during the rest of her life.... A more disgraceful bargain was never struck.

It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.

There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that one sometimes needs help with moving the piano.