All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still.

Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?

What's the use of talking? You can see for yourself that this is a barbarous country; the people have no morals; and the boredom!

I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest.

It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.

My holy of holies is the human body.

These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.