One must speak about serious things seriously.

There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue.

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 love is like a stone tied round my neck; it's dragging me down to the bottom; but I love my stone. I can't live without it.

There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man.

The unhappy are egotistical, base, unjust, cruel, and even less capable of understanding one another than are idiots. Unhappinessdoes not unite people, but separates them.

I have the feeling that I've seen everything, but failed to notice the elephants.