Nothing, you know, gives the body greater satisfaction than ordering people about, or at least believing in one's ability to do so.

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

What a fate: to be condemned to work for a firm where the slightest negligence at once gave rise to the gravest suspicion! Were all the employees nothing but a bunch of scoundrels, was there not among them one single loyal devoted man who, had he wasted only an hour or so of the firm's time in the morning, was so tormented by conscience as to be driven out of his mind and actually incapable of leaving his bed?

Was he an animal, that music could move him so? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he longed for were coming to light.

Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.

The meaning of life is that it stops.

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.