People are born in sorrow and move about the earth in patterns of sorrow without sense and without plan. Why should I take myself so seriously? I am no more important to the Creator than the trees or the vegetation which live with me on His earth. There is no eye to watch over me nor a hand to direct me, and there will be no preferred fate for me at the end, no matter what I am, or what I do with my life.

...To me it has always seemed that God is so sickened with men, and their unending cruelty to each other, that he covers the places where they have been as qui…

In the sight of my beloved, I am like iron that the smith has heated at his furnace: iron whose surface gives heat. I am a bar that is rigid and will not bend.

You can always tell an old battlefield where many men have lost their lives. The next spring the grass comes up greener and more luxuriant than on the surround…