Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.

And what does it mean -- dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.

To judge between good or bad, between successful and unsuccessful would take the eye of a God.

To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man.

In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you'll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.

My holy of holies is the human body.

Nothing can be accomplished by logic and ethics.