The Last Four Things

...the heart of a child can take forty-nine blows before it’s damaged for ever and what’s done can never be undone.

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.

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Self-pity, while it should be accorded due respect, is the greatest of all acids to the human soul.

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 in form and movement, in action how like a devil, in apprehension how like a cow. The beauty of the world? The paragon of animals? To me the quintessence of dust.

We are all cynics now, I suppose, and even a mewling infant knows that to save a life is to make an eternal enemy.

Even for the very clever it can be like breaking bones to stand back from something that’s been in front of you all your life.

Feeling sorry for yourself is a universal solvent of salvation.

It's pointless to blame someone for being themselves and looking to their own interests.

That’s why it’s much better not to have friends if you have the strength of character to do without them. In the end friends always turn into a nuisance of one kind or another. But if you must have them let them alone and accept that you must allow everyone the right to exist in accordance with the character he has, whatever it turns out to be.

Whatever discoveries have been made in the land of self-delusion, many undiscovered regions remain to be explored.

...and what is a good weapon but a good idea made murderous flesh?

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.

The search for knowledge and the discovery of a great weapon are virtually one and the same. War is the father of everything.

Nemá smysl zlobit se na někoho za to, že je sám sebou a stará se o vlastní zájmy.