Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime.

Amid the stillness of the night, in the depths of the ravine, from the direction in which the corpses lay suddenly resounded a kind of inhuman, frightful laughter in which quivered despair, and joy, and cruelty, and suffering, and pain, and sobbing, and derision; the heart-rending and spasmodic laughter of the insane or condemned.

But the French writers always had more originality and independence than others, and that regulator, which elsewhere was religion, long since ceased to exist for them.

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

England is never in a hurry because she is eternal.

Wealth is not a hindrance, but rather a help towards attaining a proper standing in a chosen field of activity. I confess that as far as I am concerned, it has done me some service as it preserved my character from many a crookedness poverty might have exposed it to.

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.