Very often among a certain highly intelligent type of people, quite paradoxical ideas will establish themselves. But they have suffered so much in their lives for these ideas, and have paid so high a price for them that it becomes very painful, indeed almost impossible, for them to part with them.
Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I’ll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.
If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be permissible, even cannibalism.
I’m sorry this letter is so long. I didn’t have time to make it shorter.
No man lives, can live, without having some object in view, and making efforts to attain that object. But when object there is none, and hope is entirely fled, anguish often turns a man into a monster.
If one waits for everyone to get wiser it will take too long.
What is honour, my dear, when you have nothing to eat?
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.
Everyone is striving to unite particulars and find at least some general sense in the general senselessness.
You are going to perform a virtuous deed, but you don’t even believe in virtue – that’s what makes you angry and torments you, that’s why you’re so vindictive.
Man is broad, too broad, indeed. I’d have him narrower.
It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth.
Fancy pants, the monk can dance!
Perhaps,” you will add, grinning, “those who have never been slapped will also not understand” – thereby politely hinting that I, too, may have experienced a slap in my life, and am therefore speaking as a connoisseur.
He’s an intelligent man, but it takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.
We have facts,’ they say. But facts are not everything – at least half the business lies in how you interpret them!
It was not you who ate the idea, but the idea that ate you.
That makes it worse! Worse and better!
But I tell you what it is; an honest and sensitive man is open; and a business man ‘listens and goes on eating’ you up.
Do you know that centuries will pass and mankind will proclaim with the mouth of its wisdom and science that there is no crime, and therefore no sin, but only hungry men? Feed them first, then ask virtue of them.