Do you have any idea how mad you sound?’ ‘Indeed I do. I have in moments of doubt considered the question of my sanity.’ (...) ‘And?’ ‘Then I consider what a piece of work is man. How defective in reason, how mean his facilities, how ugly...
The battle had been as hideous as you might expect between one side who were simply not afraid to die and another who regarded death as merely a door to the eternal life.
In such a beast as this..." (he means the army)"...it was the collective power that went, collapsing like a long-exhausted animal, at once falling under its own weight as much as that of its enemy. It was a collective death and not a matter of braver...
...the heart of a child can take forty-nine blows before it’s damaged for ever and what’s done can never be undone.
The heart of a man is a small thing but it desires great matters. It is not big enough for a dog’s dinner but the whole world is not big enough for it. Man spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to...
We are all cynics now, I suppose, and even a mewling infant knows that to save a life is to make an eternal enemy.
It is not against reason, said the Englishman, to prefer the destruction of the world to a scratch on your finger – how much easier to understand the same price for the gash in your soul.
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Many are called, few are chosen.
Self-pity, while it should be accorded due respect, is the greatest of all acids to the human soul.
Feeling sorry for yourself is a universal solvent of salvation.
Hypocrites,’ replied Cale, ‘I’ve come across a lot of them recently. I mean by that I understand now how many of them there are.
...and what is a good weapon but a good idea made murderous flesh?
