Using someone's name during a conversation was like a casual caress, like stroking their hair.

But nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute.

I never understood how anyone could feel small compared with the universe. After all, man knows how overwhelmingly large it is, and a few others things besides, and that means he is not small. The fact that man has discovered all this precisely proves his greatness.

Using someone's name during a conversation was like a casual caress, like stroking their hair.

In a world full of war, famine, oppression, deceit, monotony, what—apart from the eternal innocence of animals—offers an image of hope? A mother with a newborn child in her arms? The child may end up as a murderer or a murder victim, so that the hopeful image is a prefiguration of a pietà: a mother with her newly dead child on her lap.

All cows were like other cows, all tigers like all other tigers - What on earth happened to human beings?

That question is too good to spoil with an answer.