If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.

The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.

Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition. Of that I am firmly persuaded. He is made and constructed to that very end. And not only at the present time owing to some casual circumstance, but always, at all times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and a slave.

‎Honoured sir, poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkeness is not a virtue, and that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary--never--no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary as I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself.

I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.

If it were considered desirable to destroy a human being, the only thing necessary would be to give his work a character of uselessness

It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.