Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!

You only have to start a job of work to realize how few decent, honest folk there are about.

Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.

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

The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection.

Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.

And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching the Liberals! Heaven forbid!