When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.
God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.
Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and the Lord knows they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest.
A visitor is a friend, he brings news, good or bad, which is bread to the hungry minds in lonely places. A real friend who comes to the house is a heavenly messenger, who brings the panis angelorum.
I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.
I have read true piety defined as: loving one’s destiny unconditionally – and there is something in it. That is to say: I think that in a way this sort of “religiousness” is the condition for real happiness.
You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.
There are things which cannot be carried through even with the good will of everybody concerned
Love the pride of the conquered nations, and leave them to honour their father and their mother.
Do you know a cure for me?””Why yes,” he said, “I know a cure for everything. Salt water.””Salt water?” I asked him.”Yes,” he said, “in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.
It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.
Come now and let us go and risk our lives unnecessarily. For if they have got any value at all it is this that they gave got none. Frei lebt wer sterben kann.