Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.

Without the help of selfishness, the human animal would never have developed. Egoism is the vine by which man hoisted himself out of the swamp and escaped from the jungle.

I used the word 'prose' in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular.

Life The machine The human soul A 75mm breech My portrait

Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.

Humanity lives in its fiction.

Science is history arranged according to the superstition and taste of the moment. The vocabulary of scholars has no wit, no salt. These heavy tomes have no soul, they are filled with distress.