Quote collection
684 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"For I love the empress of my soul. I love and I cannot but love. You yourself see the whole of me. I shall fly to her, fall down before her: you were right to walk past me.. farewell and forget your victim, never trouble yourself more!"
"Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human"
"Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind."
"Whether one showed you and execution or a little finger, you would extract an equally edifying thought from both of them, and would still be content. That's the way to get on in life."
"You ache with it all; and the more mysterious it is, the more you ache."
"Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being."
"Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship."
"I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea."
"Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth."
"People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it."
"It is easier for a Russian to become an atheist than for anyone else in the world."
"One man doesn't believe in god at all, while the other believes in him so thoroughly that he prays as he murders men!"
"If you happen to have a wart on your nose or forehead, you cannot help imagining that no one in the world has anything else to do but stare at your wart, laugh at it, and condemn you for it, even though you have discovered America."
"Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education."
"Life is in ourselves and not in the external."
"It is amazing what one ray of sunshine can do for a man!"
"The formula 'Two and two make five' is not without its attractions."
"When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man becomes a monster in his misery."
"We are all happy if we but knew it."
"Since I wasn't consulted at the time of the creation of the world, I reserve for myself the right to have my own opinion about it."