For broad understanding and deep feeling, you need pain and suffering.

Man has not the right to turn aside and heed not what is happening in the world around him, and this I maintain on moral grounds of the highest order.

There is no idea, no fact, which could not be vulgarized and presented in a ludicrous light.

Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.

Nothing could be more absurd than moral lessons at such a moment! Oh, self-satisfied people: with what proud self-satisfaction such babblers are ready to utter their pronouncements! If they only knew to what degree I myself understand all the loathsomeness of my present condition, they wouldn't have the heart to teach me.

As for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture.

A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.