To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.

But gamblers know how a man can sit for almost twenty-four hours at cards, without looking to right, or to left.

Ah, Father! That’s words and only words! Forgive! If he’d not been run over, he’d have come home today drunk and his only shirt dirty and in rags and he’d have fallen asleep like a log, and I should have been sousing and rinsing till daybreak, washing his rags and the children’s and then drying them by the window and as soon as it was daylight I should have been darning them. What’s the use of talking forgiveness! I have forgiven as it is!

Never mind a little dirt, if the goal is splendid!

People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.

I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creatures is born. But only one who can appease their conscience can take over their freedom […] Instead of taking men's freedom from them, Thou didst make it greater than ever! Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?

My friend, the truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more plausible, it's absolutely necessary to mix a bit of falsehood with it. People have always done so.