He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.

Why nowadays there's a new fashion every day.

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

Good fiction doesn't come out of the basic conflict of good versus bad. Instead, it comes out of a conflict between good and good.

Is it possible to say what one really feels?

Everything depends on upbringing.

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.