Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.
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 is unhappy because he doesn’t know he’s happy. If anyone finds out he’ll become happy at once.
If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery of things.
Until you have become really, in actual fact, as brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass.
We are born dead, and we are becoming more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it.
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.
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.
All the Utopias will come to pass only when we grow wings and all people are converted into angels.
I have a plan-to go mad.
There are three forces, the only three forces capable of conquering and enslaving forever the conscience of these weak rebels in the interests of their own happiness. They are: the miracle, the mystery and authority.
At such times I felt something was drawing me away, and I kept fancying that if I walked straight on, far, far away and reached that line where the sky and earth meet, there I should find the key to the mystery, there I should see a new life a thousand times richer and more turbulent than ours.
I am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever.
Often a man endures for several years, submits and suffers the cruellest punishments, and then suddenly breaks out over some minute trifle, almost nothing at all.
You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.
Here is a commandment for you: seek happiness in sorrow. Work, work tirelessly.
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.
But try getting blindly carried away by your feelings, without reasoning, without a primary cause, driving consciousness away at least for a time; start hating, or fall in love, only so as not to sit with folded arms.
God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby’s face.
Suffering is part and parcel of extensive intelligence and a feeling heart.