All life was a breath exhaled by God. All dying was a breath inhaled by God.

It is remarkable, all that men can swallow. For a good ten minutes I read a newspaper. I allowed the spirit of an irresponsible man who chews and munches another's words in his mouth, and gives them out again undigested, to enter into me through my eyes.

The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies.

How beautiful the world was when one looked at it, without searching... just looked, simply and innocently.

Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.

Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike.

That life is difficult, I have often bitterly realized.