The world of sleep has an existence of its own.

As for the author, he is profoundly unaware of what the classical or romantic genre might consist of.... In literature, as in allthings, there is only the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false.

Those who every morning plan the transactions of the day and follow out that plan carry a thread that will guide them through the labyrinth of the most busy life. The orderly arrangement of their time is like a ray of light which darts itself through all their occupations. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidents, chaos will soon reign.

War can only be qualified by its object, and there is neither foreign war nor civil war, there is only just or unjust war.

One only needs to see a smile in a white crape bonnet in order to enter the palace of dreams.

One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.

We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve.