He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.

I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there’s a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don’t treat left nostrils, it’s not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there’s a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril.

Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from the faith.

But it is possible, it is possible: the old grief, by a great mystery of human life, gradually passes into quiet, tender joy; instead of young, ebullient blood comes a mild, serene old age: I bless the sun’s rising each day and my heart sings to it as before, but now I love its setting even more, its long slanting rays, and with them quiet, mild, tender memories, dear images from the whole of a long and blessed life–and over all is God’s truth, moving, reconciling, all-forgiving!

You cannot imagine what sorrow and anger seize one’s whole soul when a great idea, which one has long and piously revered, is picked up by some bunglers and dragged into the street, to more fools like themselves, and one suddenly meets it in the flea market, unrecognizable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion, without harmony, a toy for stupid children.

To study the meaning of man and of life — I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.

Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate … the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.

Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don’t harrass them, don’t deprive them of their happiness, don’t work against God’s intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you – alas, it is true of almost every one of us!

There were moments when I hated everybody I came across, innocent or guilty, and looked at them as thieves who were robbing me of my life with impunity. The most unbearable misfortune is when you yourself become unjust, malignant, vile; you realize it, you even reproach yourself – but you just can’t help it.

By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation.

There is no sin , and there can be no sin on all the earth , which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God . Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God?

I don’t need money, or, better, it’s not money that I need; it’s not even power; I need only what is obtained by power and simply cannot be obtained without power: the solitary and calm awareness of strength! That is the fullest definition of freedom, which the world so struggles over!

Active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with the love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one’s life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and eveyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and persistence, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.

Beggars, especially noble beggars, should never show themselves in the street; they should ask for alms through the newspapers. It’s still possible to love one’s neighbor abstractly, and even occasionally from a distance, but hardly ever up close.

In such situations, of course, people don’t nurse their anger silently, they moan aloud; but these are not frank, straightforward moans, there is a kind of cunning malice in them, and that’s the whole point. Those very moans express the sufferer’s delectation; if he did not enjoy his moans, he wouldn’t be moaning.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

Reason and Knowledge have always played a secondary, subordinate, auxiliary role in the life of peoples, and this will always be the case. A people is shaped and driven forward by an entirely different kind of force, one which commands and coerces them and the origin of which is obscure and inexplicable despite the reality of its presence.

Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.

We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.

Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.

Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.

A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.

The soul is healed by being with children.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.

Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!

To love someone means to see him as God intended him.

Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.

One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man’s laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

To live without Hope is to Cease to live.

It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

The formula ‘Two and two make five’ is not without its attractions.

Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you.

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

At first, art imitates life. Then life will imitate art.Then life will find its very existence from the arts.

They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.

If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.

The death of a child is the greatest reason to doubt the existence of God.

One must love life before loving its meaning … yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning can console us.

One must love life before loving its meaning … yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning can console us.

She looked much younger than her age, indeed, which is almost always the case with women who retain serenity of spirit, sensitiveness and pure sincere warmth of heart to old age.

I believe there is no one deeper, lovelier, more sympathetic and more perfect than Jesus…

Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering…

A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals.

The Russian soul is a dark place.

I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there – that is living.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

Perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I’ve never been able to start or finish anything.

May you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart. Isn’t such a moment sufficient for the whole of one’s life?

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others.

Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams.

A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof.

The world will be saved by beauty.

I think the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.

Men like to to count their troubles; few calculate their happiness.

The most offensive is not their lying—one can always forgive lying—lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth—what is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying…

I want to suffer and be purified by suffering!

God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby’s face.

Paradise is hidden in each one of use, it is concealed within me too, right now, and if I wish, it will come for me in reality, tomorrow even, and for the rest of my life.

If you love all things, you will also attain the divine mystery that is in all things. For then your ability to perceive the truth will grow every day, and your mind will open itself to an all-embracing love

They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?

Was it all put into words, or did both understand that they had the same thing at heart and in their minds, so that there was no need to speak of it aloud, and better not to speak of it?

To love another person is to see them as God intended them to be.

The man who is happy is fulfilling the purpose of existence

Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.

From a hundred rabbits you can’t make a horse.

Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee, all so amazingly know their path, though they have not intelligence, they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it themselves.

If you can put the question, ‘Am I or am I not responsible for my acts?’ then you are responsible.

Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice.

I’ve always considered myself smarter than everyone around me, and sometimes, believe me, I’ve been ashamed of it. At the least, all my life I’ve looked away and never could look people straight in the eye.

The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced at the existence of God and the immortality of your soul.

There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in later years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home.

Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.

I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.

Believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful; bring your offering even then and praise God in your loneliness.

I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.

My friend, the truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more plausible, it’s absolutely necessary to mix a bit of falsehood with it. People have always done so.

To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.

The more incompetent one feels, the more eager he is to fight.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel.

What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything? Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.

To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.

Wealth is the number of things one can do without.

But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions.

Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.

My soul bleeds and the blood steadily, silently, disturbingly slowly, swallows me whole.

The more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.

Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest.

Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.

Nature doesn’t ask your permission; it doesn’t care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You’re obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well.

Nothing is more seductive for a man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.

There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words.

Intelligence alone is not nearly enough when it comes to acting wisely.

Only through sufering can we find ourselves.

People really do like seeing their best friends humiliated; a large part of the friendship is based on humiliation; and that is an old truth,well known to all intelligent people.