I too have my indignant hours, but I hide them because impotent indignation is ridiculous. Because I couldn't be proud, I became humble to save myself the shame of becoming mean.
His tenderness is melancholy tinged with decency, his tranquility has the flavour of resignation.
Born to love, damned to indifference.
People speak ill of lotteries without thinking that they are the only form of speculation known to the poor. To ban the Sunday draw would be to deprive men and women whom reality has given nothing anyway of the entire field of dreams.
Reason, put to sleep so clumsily, let its cry ring out more than once in the middle of the orgy of heartfelt emotion.
In winning a loving heart, you gain a fruitful grateful field, where you reap more in happiness than you sow in hopes.
Too much trust often proves stupid, too much mistrust always proves a misery.
The experience had excited both his heart and his mind, like a stone thrown into a swamp.
The wild shoots of his mean spirit shot up suddenly as he was struck by the sunbeams of unexpected good fortune.
Too weak either to better himself or become a total scumbag, he wanders along the broad path between regret and impenitence.
Ivy-like soul which has to have something to coil round and in its needy coiling takes every stick for a cedar tree.
The body is the stubborn worshipper of life and rebels against the soul's graveyard hankerings.
He has a son - you know the sort of thing that happens to so many fathers.
In his case faults and weaknesses are wild flowers, not poison weeds.
Ghosts whose spirits stray about after the bodies they've sloughed off have been laid in earth are not that terrifying. But the innumerable ghosts who have buried their spirits - who have carried their better selves to an earthly grave and pursue their haunting activities in broad daylight by means of bodies without the least trace of spirit or wit - now, they're scary.
Superstition and fear are the Muses of feeble spirits.
To be done with the interregnum of boredom and set mind, spirit, wit on the throne again.
To avoid frightening people, fate sometimes assumes the mercurial expression of pure chance.
The nightingale of love likes best to strike up its song in the dark grove of the forbidden - only rarely on the military road of duty.
The past is my capital, memory the interest I live off.
The deeper I plumb the dark domain of my ideas, the more surely I come upon the abyss of my contradictions.
Love is a dream, marriage a business.
We lost what was ours by nobler means than she won what's hers.
Illusions take leave of the human heart slowly, in single drops.
Don't take the false steps of the spirit for necessities of the heart.
Female enthusiast gazes at the moon and recalls the time when she and the earth still had something in common.
A true businessman is a great oddity - what we're talking about is a man who has forced his entire being into the columns of a double-entry account - who has made of himself an artificial calculating machine - who has torn his heart painfully from his breast, has trampled all the fair flowers of life into the ground just as he has its illusions, who has put down pebble-mix over his earthly portion of the garden of paradise so he can stack up bundles of saleable produce - having become an artifical being, hearkening no more to the nightingale's song, etc. . .
While reality howls like a storm the ideal slumbers serenely in the whisper-filled chamber of the imagination.
How lavishly he expresses in twenty sublime words what can be said in a single syllable - he's obviously gifted as an author.
(Trans. C.S.)
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