Everything around is alive with an infinite number of forms; while mankind fly for security to their petty houses, from the shelter of which they rule in their imaginations over the wide-extended universe. Poor fool! in whose petty estimation all things are little.
Nothing builds authority up like silence, splendor of the strong and shelter of the weak.
The world is that disaster you see, not because of the troubles made by wrongdoer, but for the righteous' inactivity that they realize it and simply watch.
Being born in a duck yard does not matter, if only you are hatched from a swan's egg.
Isn't life all the more beautiful because from a moment to the next one may lose it?
An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.
No trace of that vanished world, no heart beat that answers my past feelings! I am like a ghost, who sees battered and burnt that castle which once he, a blooming prince, had created adorning it of every splendour, and that dying had left, full of hope, to his beloved son...
Mad are those who cannot see that the place means nothing, and that he who has the first position rarely sits in the most important office! How many kings are governed by their ministers, how many ministers from their secretaries! Who is then the first? I think he who dominates others, he who has sufficient power or cunning to make his passion work out in the execution of his plans.
"This is another of your extravagant humours", said Albert: "you always exaggerate a case, and in this matter you are undoubtedly wrong; for we were speaking of suicide, which you compare with great actions, when it is impossible to regard it as anything but a weakness. It is much easier to die than to bear a life of misery with fortitude." I was on the point of breaking off the conversation, for nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart. However, I composed myself, for I had often heard the same observation with sufficient vexation; and I answered him, therefore, with a little warmth, "You call this a weakness --beware of being led astray by appearances. When a nation, which has long groaned under the intolerable yoke of a tyrant, rises at last and throws off its chains, do you call that weakness? The man who, to rescue his house from the flames, finds his physical strength redoubled, so that he lifts burdens with ease, which, in the absence of excitement, he could scarcely move; he who, under the rage of an insult, attacks and puts to flight half a score of his enemies, are such persons to be called weak? My good friend, if resistance be strength, how can the highest degree of resistance be a weakness?"
More than once have I been drunk, my passions are not far from delirium, and of these two things I do not feel sorry because I have learnt to understand that all extraordinary men that have done something great, and that seemed impossible to achieve, have been considered in every era to be drunks or mad. But, even in everyday life it is unbearable to hear say, every time that someone is about to do a free, noble and unexpected action "That man is drunk, he is mad!"
Be ashamed of yourselves, you sober and wise men!