A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.
This is my last message to you: in sorrow, seek happiness.
If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself.
It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.
Love a man, even in his sin, for that love is a likeness of the divine love, and is the summit of love on earth.
There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.
A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.
The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.
You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.
I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.
And what’s strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.
It was a marvelous night, the sort of night one only experiences when one is young. The sky was so bright, and there were so many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn’t help wondering how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such a sky.
They were like two enemies in love with one another.
Truly great men must, I think, experience great sorrow on the earth.
Compassion is the chief law of human existence.
Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. –The Grand Inquisitor.
Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.
One can fall in love and still hate.
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.
If he’s honest, he’ll steal; if he’s human, he’ll murder; if he’s faithful, he’ll deceive.