Bolesław Prus

"Folly is as great as the sea, it will compass anything."

"A life whose beginning we do not remember, and whose end we do not know."

"And is there no war on today? It is the weapons that have changed, that's all. Instead of an axe or scythe or scimitar, they fight with roubles."

"For human nature is strange: the less we are inclined to self-sacrifice, the more we insist on it in others."

"In all of nature, a male belongs to a female that he fancies and who fancies him. And so among the animals there are no idiots. But with us!... I'm a Jew, so I musn't love a Christian woman... He's a merchant, so he's got no right to a countess... And you who've got no money, you've no rights to any woman at all..."

"Money really is a great power, only one must know how to use it."

"Pity is an emotion equally unpleasant to the bestower as to the recipient."

"There are neither graves nor death in Nature; there are various forms of existence, some of which enable us to be chemists, others only chemical substances."

"‘There are two men in me,’ he thought, ‘one quite sensible, the other a lunatic. But I am not concerned with that any longer... What shall I do, though, if the sensible man wins?’"

"Your true Pole starts to sweat at the second decimal place, at the fifth he runs a temperature, and at the seventh has a stroke..."

"Nature has done well and wisely, in not permitting a man to live forever and in bringing into the world ever new generations. An old person is a used-up machine [... He] has too many dogmas to [...] easily [...] believe in a new truth [...]; too many sympathies and antipathies [...] for him to come to love something unfamiliar; [...] too many habits to be able to settle on new ways. Let us add suspiciousness — the fruit of bitter experiences; a pessimism inseparable from all manner of disappointments; and finally, a general decline of powers from exhaustion [...]."