Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one's own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one's pen.

We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there's no altering that.

There are always so many conjectures as to the issue of any event that, whatever the outcome, there will always be people to say: 'I said then that it would be so'

Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.

Why does an apple fall when it is ripe? Is it brought down by the force of gravity? Is it because its stalk withers? Because it is dried by the sun, because it grows too heavy, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it? None of these is the cause.... Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own freewill is in the historical sense not free at all but is bound up with the whole course of history and preordained from all eternity.

To sin is a human business, to justify sins is a devilish business.