As you walk, you cut open and create that river bed into which the stream of your descendants shall enter and flow.

To cleave that sea [the Aegean] in the gentle autumnal season, murmuring the name of each islet, is to my mind the joy most apt to transport the heart of man into paradise.

It was certainly not this mummified and outrageously painted old woman he was seeing before him, but the entire "female species," as it was his custom to call women. The individual disappeared, the features were obliterated, whether young or senile, beautiful or ugly - those were mere unimportant variations. Behind each woman rises the austere, sacred and mysterious face of Aphrodite.

The only thing I know is this: I am full of wounds and still standing on my feet.

As you walk, you cut open and create that river bed into which the stream of your descendants shall enter and flow.

Free yourself from one passion to be dominated by another and nobler one. But is not that, too, a form of slavery? To sacrifice oneself to an idea, to a race, to God? Or does it mean that the higher the model the longer the longer the tether of our slavery?

How could I, who loved life so intensely, have let myself be entangled for so long in that balderdash of books and paper blackened with ink!