You know...my flower...I'm responsible for her. And she's so weak! And so naive. She has four ridiculous thorns to defend her against the world.

We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.

Charity never humiliated him who profited from it, nor ever bound him by the chains of gratitude, since it was not to him but to God that the gift was made.

Defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom, and above all futility.

To be a man is to feel that one's own stone contributes to building the edifice of the world.

If I were to command a general to turn into a seagull, and if the general did not obey, that would not be the general's fault. It would be mine.

Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.