That's just the point: an honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business goes on eating - and then he eats you up.

Reason and Knowledge have always played a secondary, subordinate, auxiliary role in the life of peoples, and this will always be the case. A people is shaped and driven forward by an entirely different kind of force, one which commands and coerces them and the origin of which is obscure and inexplicable despite the reality of its presence.

You’re a gentleman,” they used to say to him. “You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman.

Trifles, trifles are what matter!

It is not the real punishment. The only effectual one, the only deterrent and softening one, lies in the recognition of sin by conscience.

in the newspapers I read a biography about an American. He left his whole huge fortune to factories and for the positive sciences, his skeleton to the students at the academy there, and his skin to make a drum so as to have the American national anthem drummed on it day and night.

When reason fails, the devil helps!