Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one's enemies-- but not before they have been hanged.

I live, which is the main point.

Perfumes are the feelings of flowers, and as the human heart, imagining itself alone and unwatched, feels most deeply in the night-time, so seems it as if the flowers, in musing modesty, await the mantling eventide ere they give themselves up wholly to feeling...

Man,--the aristocrat amongst the animals.

I consider it a degradation and a stain on my honor to submit to baptism in order to qualify myself for state employment in Prussia.

The more i get to know people, the more i like dogs.

Round my cradle shimmered the last moonbeams of the eighteenth century and the first morning rays of the nineteenth.