Happiness does not await us all. One needn’t be a prophet to say that there will be more grief and pain than serenity and money. That is why we must hang on to one another.
One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.
One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.
Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!
We learn about life not from plusses alone, but from minuses as well.
The stupider the peasant, the better the horse understands him.
All saints have pasts and all sinners have a future.
If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.
When men ask me how I know so much about men, they get a simple answer: everything I know about men, I learned from me.
There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man.
There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.
Every coming year is as bad as the previous one, the only difference being that in most cases it is even worse.
It’s very hard, feeling that you’re no more than a piece of unwanted furniture in this world.
It’s better to live down a scandal than to ruin one’s life.
Nothing can be accomplished by logic and ethics.
Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave’s blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being – not a slave’s – coursing through his veins.
The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burden in silence. Without this silence, happiness would be impossible.
The wealthy are always surrounded by hangers-on; science and art are as well.
It’s easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.
The sea has neither meaning nor pity.