Quotes from August Strindberg

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Life is not so idiotically mathematical that only the big eat the small; it is just as common for a bee to kill a lion or at least to drive it mad.

There are poisons that blind you, and poisons that open your eyes.

It's wonderful how, the moment you talk about God and love, your voice becomes hard, and your eyes fill with hatred. No, Margret, you certainly haven't the true faith.

I dream, therefore I exist.

Autumn is my spring!

We are already in Hell. It is the earth itself that is Hell, the prison constructed for us by an intelligence superior to our own, in which I could not take a step without injuring the happiness of others, and in which my fellow creatures could not enjoy their own happiness without causing me pain.

Love between a man and woman is war.

Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations.

I, too, am beginning to feel an immense need to become a savage and create a new world.

if you are afraid of loneliness, don't get married

The further from one another, the nearer one can be.

And why does man weep when he is sad? I asked at last—Because the glass in the eyes must be washed now and then, so that we can see clearly, said the child.

Those who won't accept evil never get anything good.

You are impossible. You are only a realist, and therefore nothing happens to you.

Yes, I am crying although I am a man. But has not a man eyes! Has not a man hands, limbs, senses, thoughts, passions? Is he not fed with the wine food, hurt by the same weapons, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as a woman? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? And if you poison us, do we not die? Why shouldn't a man complain, a soldier weep? Because it is unmanly? Why is it unmanly?

A man with a so-called character is often a simple piece of mechanism; he has often only one point of view for the extremely complicated relationships of life.

At last everything was satisfactorily arranged, and I could not help admiring the setting: these mingled touches betrayed on a small scale the inspiration of a poet, the research of a scientist, the good taste of an artist, the gourmet's fondness for good food, and the love of flowers, which concealed in their delicate shadows a hint of the love of women

One gets more and more humble the longer one lives, and in the shadow of death many things look different.

as soon as a work of art is of practical use, betrays a purpose or a tendency its beauty vanishes.

Every moment of enjoyment Brings to some one else a sorrow, But your sorrow gladdens no one, For from sorrow naught but sorrow springs.

For the whole of life consists of nothing but contradictions. The rich are the poor in spirit; the many little men hold the power, and the great only serve the little men. I've never met such proud people as the humble; I've never met an uneducated man who didn't believe himself in a position to criticise learning and to do without it.

The ball was held in a middle-class home. The girls were anemic - some of them; the others were red as raspberries. John liked the pale ones best, the ones with black or blue rings round their eyes. They looked so sad and suffering and pitiable, and they cast tender yearning glances at him, such yearning glances.

How sweet is life after all, when the mist of a mild intoxication casts its veil over the miseries of existence.