Nevertheless, in this sea of human wretchedness and malice there bloomed at times compassion, as a pale flower blooms in a putrid marsh.

I go to church because I am a skeptic in regard to my own skepticism.

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.

The shots had dispersed the birds; there remained only two marabous, standing between ten and twenty paces away and plunged in reverie. They were like two old men with bald heads pressed between the shoulders.

On an exhausted field, only weeds grow.

Day is like day as two beads in a rosary, unless changes of weather form the only variety.

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.