Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn't take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.

Life is to blame for everything.

It was the tenderness mingled with melancholy which we bring to a time that belongs irrevocably to the past, when a pale, delicate shadow rises from it bearing the lilies of the dead, and in it we find a forgotten likeness to ourselves. And that faint, wistful shadow, that pale scent, seemed to vanish away into a wide, full, warm stream - the life that now lay open before him.

One does what one is; one becomes what one does.

You proclaim that one should die for the highest virtues, because you take it for granted that nobody's been living for them, not even for a single hour.

Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn't take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.

Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.