Drive nature out of the door and it will fly in at the window

Here is a commandment for you: seek happiness in sorrow. Work, work tirelessly.

Never be frightened at your own faint-heartedness in attaining love. Don’t be frightened overmuch even at your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is...

Two and two do make four. Nature doesn’t ask your advice. She isn’t interested in your preferences or whether or not you approve of her laws. You must accept nature as she is with all...

Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it … one must have the courage to dare.

I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real...

My sweetheart! When I think of you, it’s as if I’m holding some healing balm to my sick soul, and although i suffer for you, i find that even suffering for you is easy.

Oh, gentlemen, 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. Granted, granted I’m a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler,...

What’s most revolting is that one is really sad! No, it’s better at home. Here at least one blames others for everything and excuses oneself.

And, beginning to grind his teeth again, Pyotr Petrovich admitted that he’d been a fool–but only to himself, of course.

One of the characters in our story, Gavril Ardalionovitch Ivolgin, belonged to the other category; he belonged to the category of “much cleverer” people; though head to toe he was infected with the desire to...

The poor girl ws keeping that student’s letter as a precious treasure, and had run to fetch it, her only treasure, because she did not want me to go away without knowing that she, too,...

They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.

The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.

Why did you come in to-night with your heads in the air? ‘Make way, we are coming! Give us every right and don’t you dare breathe a word before us. Pay us every sort of...

Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are...

A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.

We obtained literature by our own efforts, it is a product of our own life, and that is why we love it so much and hold it so dear, why we pin our hopes on...

Naten s’kisha gjume, me mbyste pendimi, kot thone qe pendimi te lehteson.

Ils verseront de sottes larmes et comprendront, que le créateur, en les faisant rebelles a voulu se moquer d’eux, assurément. Ils le crieront avec désespoir et ce blasphème les rendra encore plus malheureux.

My joy is that there is no such world at all, but that the substance of life is in everyone! There is no reason to be troubled because we are absurd, is there? For we...

in your face I seem to read some trouble of mind. When you came in I read it, and that was why I addressed you at once. For in unfolding to you the story of...

Nuk shquhej për zgjuarsi, por në mësime ishte i pari.

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

I looked at her for three seconds, or five perhaps, with fearful hatred-that hate which is only a hair’s-breath from love, from the maddest love!

It’s not miracles that generate faith, but faith that generates miracles

For everyone now strives most of all to seperate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life, but...

And if it is a mystery, then we, too, had the right to preach mystery and to teach them that it is not the free choice of the heart that matters, and not love, but...

Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

A necessidade de comer e beber é simplesmente o instinto de autoconservação!- Mas não acha que esse instinto de autopreservação por si só é importante? Ora, o instinto de autoconservação é a lei normal da...

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. When...

May it not be that he loves chaos and destruction (there can be no disputing that he does sometimes love it) because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and completing the edifice he...

Loving someone is different from being in love with someone. You can hate someone you’re in love with

Sí, a veces la idea más absurda, la idea más fantástica en apariencia, se apodera de nosotros con tal fuerza que acabamos por creerla realizable.

Yet, I didn’t understand that she was intentionally disguising her feelings with sarcasm; that was usually the last resort of people who are timid and chaste of heart, whose souls have been coarsely and impudently...

Fyodor Pavlovitch was drunk when he heard of his wife’s death, and the story is that he ran out into the street and began shouting with joy, raising his hands to Heaven: “Lord, now lettest...

…there is no explaining anything by reasoning and so it is useless to reason.

We keep imagining eternity as an idea that cannot be grasped, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, imagine suddenly that there will be one little room there, something...

Oh, how unbearable is a happy person sometimes!

It is precisely that requirement of shared worship that has been the principal source of suffering for individual man and the human race since the beginning of history. In their efforts to impose universal worship,...

…the laws of nature have continually all my life offended me more than anything.

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....

Man only likes counting his grief, he doesn’t count his happiness. But if he were to count properly, he’d see that there’s enough of both lots for him.

Consciousness is man’s greatest misfortune, still I know that man loves it and will not exchange it for any satisfactions.

I swear to you that to think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease.

Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.

He longed to revenge himself on everyone for his own unseemliness

We’ve already had Malthus, the friend of humanity. But the friend of humanity with shaky moral principles is the devourer of humanity, to say nothing of his conceit; for, wound the vanity of any one...

You said just now, “Don’t be so ashamed of yourself, because that’s the root of your trouble”––with those words, you seem to have reached right into my innermost soul. What I mean is, when I...

And therefore the idea of serving mankind, of the brotherhood and oneness of people, is fading more and more in the world, and indeed the idea now even meets with mockery, for how can one...