“Lawyers make nothing but confusion... A lawyer is an instrument of the devil. In general, he's a fiendish idiot, banking on the stupidity of people much more stupid than himself, and by God he's always right.”

“The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.”

“Then he had kept himself to himself, "in the way you might stick by a tree, which might be rotten, but at least it's a tree," and heart and understanding had been dismissed, pushed into the background.”

“People keep a dog and are ruled by this dog, and even Schopenhauer was ruled in the end not by his head, but by his dog. This fact is more depressing than any other.”

“Those who live in the country get idiotic in time, without noticing it, for a while they think it's original and good for their health, but life in the country is not original at all, for anyone who wasn't born in and for the country it shows a lack of taste and is only harmful to their health. The people who go walking in the country walk right into their own funeral in the country and at the very least they lead a grotesque existence which leads them first into idiocy, then into an absurd death.”

“Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.”

“The empty rooms always had a terribly depressing effect upon my father when he considered, he said, that the person who dwelt in them had to fill them solely with his own fantasies, with fantastic objects, in order not to go out of his mind.”