“I’m incapable of describing the feeling with which I left. I wouldn’t want it ever to be repeated, but I would have considered myself unfortunate if I’d never experienced it.”

Illness isn’t the only thing that spoils the appetite.

Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man’s the workman in it.

Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel.

The fact is that previously they were simply dunces and now they’ve suddenly become nihilists.

Who among us has the strength to oppose petty egoism, those petty good feelings, pity and remorse?

Sternly, remorselessly, fate guides each of us; only at the beginning, when we’re absorbed in details, in all sorts of nonsense, in ourselves, are we unaware of its harsh hand.

Take what you can yourself, and don’t let others get you into their hands; to belong to oneself, that is the whole thing in life.

I agree with no one’s opinion. I have some of my own.

Don’t force me into saying what I don’t want to say, and what I won’t say.

A son is like a lopped off branch. As a falcon he comes when he wills and goes where he lists.

Death’s an old joke, but each individual encounters it anew.

I don’t see why it’s impossible to express everything that’s on one’s mind.

What did I hope for, what did I expect, what rich future did I foresee, when the phantom of my first love, rising up for an instant, barely called forth one sigh, one mournful sentiment?

Most people can’t understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do.

However much you knock at nature’s door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.

Time, as is well known, sometimes flies like a bird and sometimes crawls like a worm, but human beings are generally particularly happy when they don’t notice whether it’s passing quickly or slowly.

I just think the American people had expected that the president of the United States would be able to describe what he’s going to do in the next four years. But he can’t. He can’t even explain what he’s done in the last four years.

My doctrine is as I’ve described, which is confidence in our cause, clarity in our purpose, and resolve in our might.

But I know also that still more interesting discoveries will be made that I have not the imagination to describe – and I am awaiting them, full of curiosity and enthusiasm.

I have come to see the nonsense of attempting to describe fine scenery. There is no such possibility. If scenery could be adequately reproduced in words, there would have been no need of God’s making it in reality.

I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species.

However exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers, the true practical system can be learned only in the world.

Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy ‘savages.’ There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there.

No; I did not hate him. The word is too weak. There is no word in the language strong enough to describe my feelings. I can say only that I knew the gnawing of a desire for vengeance on him that was a pain in itself and that exceeded all the bounds of language.