...avoid tendency to make hasty and definitive judgments, a mania which, owing to our exaggerated self-confidence, we shall perhaps never be rid of.
. . .
This is the stuff we're made of, half indifference and half malice.
. . .
...that if, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt.
. . .
Confronted by death, what is expected of nature is that rancour should lose its force and poison, it is true that people say that past hatred die hard, and of this there is ample proof in literature and life, but the feeling here, deep down, as it were, was not hatred and, in no sense old, for how does the theft of a car compare with the life of the man who stole it...
. . .
When someone starts making small concessions, in the end life loses all meaning.
. . .
Cliches are like that, they are insensitive to the thousand subtleties of meaning.
. . .
In a way, everything we eat has been stolen from the mouths of others and if we rob them of too much we are responsible for their death, one way or another we are all murderers.
. . .
The desperate flight of these people made them leave their belongings behind, and when necessity conquers fear, they come back for them, then the difficult problem will be to settle in a satisfactory manner what is mine and what is yours.
. . .
If a person kills another, for example, it would be better to state this fact openly, directly, and to trust that the horror of the act, in itself, is so shocking that there is no need for us to say it was horrible.
. . .
Do you mean that we have more words than we need, I mean that we have too few feelings.
