I’ve long stopped worrying about who invented whom – God man or man God.
Beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity.
The Golden Age is the most implausible of all dreams. But for it men have given up their life and strength; for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain; without it the people will not live and cannot die.
Sometimes we desire absolute nonsense because in our stupidity we see in this nonsense the easiest way of attaining some conjectural good.
It’s in the homes of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness.
Man has not the right to turn aside and heed not what is happening in the world around him, and this I maintain on moral grounds of the highest order.
We do not understand that life is paradise, for it suffices only to wish to understand it, and at once paradise will appear in front of us in its beauty.
I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.
Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive?
Let us first fulfill Christ’s injunction ourselves and only then venture to expect it of our children. Otherwise we are not fathers, but enemies of our children, and they are not our children, but our enemies, and we have made them our enemies ourselves.
To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well.
It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that everyone was forsaking me and going away from me.
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.
Every man needs a place to go to.
Life is what matters, life alone – the continuous, eternal process of discovering life – and not the discovery itself.
I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.
If the spirit has passed through a great many sensations, possibly it can no longer be sated with them, but grows more excited, and demands more sensations, and stronger and stronger ones, until at length it falls exhausted.
Humiliate the reason and distort the soul.
How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?
Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?