And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better – cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?
But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure? Answer: Of himself. Well, so I will talk about myself.
And though I suffer for you, yet it eases my heart to suffer for you.
Loving someone is different from being in love with someone. You can hate someone you’re in love with.
I have no self-respect. But can a man of acute sensibility respect himself at all?
We must never forget that human motives are generally far more complicated than we are apt to suppose, and that we can very rarely accurately describe the motives of another.
To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving.
I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.
I may be mistaken but it seems to me that a man may be judged by his laugh, and that if at first encounter you like the laugh of a person completely unknown to you, you may say with assurance that he is good.
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
It is a law of nature that every decent man on earth is bound to be a coward and a slave.
What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind-then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it’s all as it should be.
He seemed, indeed, to accept everything without the least condemnation though often grieving bitterly.
Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it – that is what you must do.
To strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering – that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead.
Talking nonsense is man’s only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.
Two and two 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 the consequences that that implies.
But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease.
Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends.
What can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.