"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…"

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The Russian soul is a dark place."

"Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering..."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"The formula 'Two and two make five' is not without its attractions."

"If there is no God, everything is permitted."

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

"Realists do not fear the results of their study."

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

"To live without Hope is to Cease to live."

"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."

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

"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!"

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"... 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."

"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."