"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."

"From a hundred rabbits you can't make a horse."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"Wealth is the number of things one can do without."

"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."

"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."

"To go wrong in one's own way is better then to go right in someone else's."

"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."

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

"Only through suffering can we find ourselves."

"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."

"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."