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.

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

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.

But I think happiness springs from another source, a far deeper one that doesn't depend on will because it comes from love.

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.