But it's precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this deliberate burying of yourself underground for forty years out of sheer pain, in this assiduously constructed, and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness, in all this poision of unfulfilled desires turned inward, this fever of vacillations, of resolutions adopted for eternity, and of repentances a moment later that you find the very essence of that strange, sharp pleasure.

Perhaps a normal man is supposed to be stupid-how do we know? Perhaps it's even very beautiful.

I cannot understand why the world is arranged as it is.

Drowning men, it is said, cling to wisps of straw.

Power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare!

It is amazing what one ray of sunshine can do for a man!

In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.