Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
. . . finally, I couldn't imagine how I could live without books, and I stopped dreaming about marrying that Chinese prince. . . .
The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.
"I love mankind," he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular."
It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.
For men are made for happiness, and any one who is completely happy has a right to say to himself, 'I am doing God's will on earth.'
That's just the point: an honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business goes on eating - and then he eats you up.
One circumstance tormented me then: Namely, that no one else was like me, and I was like no one else. I am only one, and they are all.
If it were considered desirable to destroy a human being, the only thing necessary would be to give his work a character of uselessness
But what are years, what are months!" he would exclaim. "Why count the days, when even one day is enough for man to know all happiness.
The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.
It's in despair that you find the sharpest pleasures, particularly when you are most acutely aware of the hopelessness of your position.
Power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare!
Don't think I'm talking nonsense because I'm drunk. I'm not a bit drunk. Brandy's all very well, but I need two bottles to make me drunk.
What if, when this fog scatters and flies upward, the whole rotten, slimey city goes with it, rises with the fog and vanishes like smoke.
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.
Although your mind works, your heart is darkened with depravity; and without a pure heart there can be no complete and true consciousness
Sometimes we desire absolute nonsense because in our stupidity we see in this nonsense the easiest way of attaining some conjectural good.
I agree that two and two make four is an excellent thing; but to give everything its due, two and two make five is also a very fine thing.
It is not the real punishment. The only effectual one, the only deterrent and softening one, lies in the recognition of sin by conscience.
To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.
To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well.
Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.
they may all be drunk at my place, but they're all honest, and though we do lie-because I lie, too-in the end we'll lie our way to the truth
You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all.
People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.
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.
You’re a gentleman,” they used to say to him. “You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman.
It is always so, when we are unhappy we feel more strongly the unhappiness of others; our feeling is not shattered, but becomes concentrated.
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.
It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept.
Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.
You can't be angry with me, because I am a hundred times more severely punished than you, if only by the fact that I shall never see you again.
My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmatic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking?
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.
I have been tortured with longing to believe ... and the yearning grows stronger the more cogent the intellectual difficulties stand in the way.
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?
A new philosophy, a new way of life, is not given for nothing. It has to be paid dearly for and only acquired with much patience and great effort
To strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering -- that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead.
An artist must know the reality he is depicting in its minutest detail. In my opinion we have only one shining example of that - Count Leo Tolstoy.
Even as I approach the gambling hall, as soon as I hear, two rooms away, the jingle of money poured out on the table, I almost go into convulsions.
And yet I am convinced that man will never give up true suffering- that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole root of consciousness.
Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.
An anguish of longing would boil up inside me; a hysterical thirst for contradictions and contrasts would appear, and I would embark on dissipations.
Of course my jokes are in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is because I have no respect for myself.
Let it not be a beautiful face,' I thought, 'but to make up for that, let it be a noble, an expressive, and, above all, an extremely intelligent one.
But I always liked side-paths, little dark back-alleys behind the main road- there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt.
In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall.
Man has not the right to turn aside and heed not what is happening in the world around him, and this I maintain on moral grounds of the highest order.
I have seen the truth. It is not as though I had invented it in my mind. I have seen it, SEEN IT and the living image of it has filled my soul forever.