But now it was spring again, and spring was almost unbearable for sensitive hearts. It drove creation to its utmost limits, it wafted its spice-laden breath even into the nostrils of the innocent.

When good befalls a man he calls it Providence, when evil fate.

What if one were up there, drifting about among suns and feeling the tails of comets fan one's forehead! How small the earth was and how puny the people; a Norway of two million provincial souls and a mortgage bank to help feed them! What was life worth at such a rate? You elbowed yourself ahead in the sweat of your face for a few mortal years, only to perish all the same, all the same!

No worse fate can befall a young man or woman than becoming prematurely entrenched in prudence and negation.

Do not forget, some give little, and it is much for them, others give all, and it costs them no effort; who then has given most?

There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.

In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.