He always smiles, even when contemplating nothing good.

An excessive preponderance of an idealistic mood is harmful to society: it creates daydreaming, political Don Quixotism, hope for heavenly intervention. This is an undeniable truth--but it is also true that every extreme is harmful.

The profession of the writer has its thorns about which the reader does not dream.

In the presence of the storm, thunderbolts, hurricane, rain, darkness, and the lions, which might be concealed but a few paces away, he felt disarmed and helpless.

There is within us a moral instinct which forbids us to rejoice at the death of even an enemy.

The sky is one whole, the water another; and between those two infinities the soul of man is in loneliness.

This homage has been rendered not to me - for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me - but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius.