The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account.

It was such a beautiful day I decided to stay in bed.

The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel.

When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right.

If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.

There is no object to life. To nature nothing matters but the continuation of the species.

I don't understand anything. Life is so strange. I feel like some one who's lived all his life by a duck-pond and suddenly is shown the sea. It makes me a little breathless, and yet it fills me with elation. I don't want to die, I want to live. I'm beginning to feel a new courage. I feel like one of those old sailors who set sail for undiscovered seas and I think my soul hankers for the unknown.