“It was a world which granted privileges to some and imposed prohibitions on others…Endowed with strength and eager to learn, one had to drag himself in a narrow prison cell when he could see an open field, a vast horizon in the distance; when he could feel the beatings of a heart; and when he believed himself entitled to enjoy the beauty of a dream.”

“A man will often believe himself a leader when he is led; while with his mind he endeavours to reach one goal, his heart insensibly drags him toward another.”

“He sees himself in his lover as if in a mirror, not knowing whom he sees, And when they are together, he too is released from pain, and when apart, he longs as he himself is longed for; for reflected in his heart is love's image, which is love's answer. But he calls it, and believes it, not love but friendship…”

“He had a heart that could have held the entire empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar.”

“Man never thinks himself happy, but when he enjoys those things which others want or desire.”

“There in that pool stained with green blood, he had learned two things: one was that all the pain stopped when you stopped fighting death; and the other was that as long as you could still hear your heart beating, you had to keep fighting back.”

“And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.”

“Mercy, I have learned, is a thing that is withheld from one whenever he most needs it,” he said. “Yet when he is in a position to grant it himself, those who withheld it previously cry out for it.”

“Complete, at the same time, was his confidence in his own judgment when it spoke to him decisively. He was one of those few that could believe and know as well as inquire and be of opinion. When I remember how much he admired intellectual force, how much he had of it himself, and yet how unconsciously and contentedly he gave others credit for superiority, I again see the healthy spirit of the genuine man.”

“Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being.”