There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.

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.

If he's honest, he'll steal; if he's human, he'll murder; if he's faithful, he'll deceive.

Human laziness makes people pigeonhole one another at first site so that they find nothing in common with one another.

There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in later years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home.

Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.

Or renounce life altogether! Accept fate obediently as it is, once and for all, and stifle everything in myself, renouncing any right to act, to live, to love.