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.
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.