To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.

I am often on guard over the Russians. In the darkness one sees their forms move like stick storks, like great birds. They come close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it. Their fingers hook round the mesh.

It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.

... but that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.

Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.

The war has ruined us for everything.