The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings.

One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.

Sometimes we go to a play and after the curtain has been up five minutes we have a sense of being able to settle back in the arms of the playwright. Instinctively we know that the playwright knows his business.

I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it's disorderly it's not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything, through my infidelity.

Do you remember you shot a seagull? A man came by chance, saw it and destroyed it, just to pass the time.

You look boldly ahead; isn't it only that you don't see or divine anything terrible in the future; because life is still hidden from your young eyes.

People should be beautiful in every way - in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts, and in their innermost selves.