Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.
In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning and cruelty.
It is within my power either to serve God or not to serve Him. Serving Him, I add to my own good and the good of the whole world. Not serving Him, I forfeit my own good and deprive the world of that good, which was in my power to create.
Happiness is pleasure without regret.
Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there’s no forcing it.
All that day she had had the feeling that she was playing in the theatre with actors better than herself and that her poor playing spoiled the whole thing.
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.
The essence of all slavery consists in taking the product of another’s labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live.
A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.
The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.
Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.
A monkey was carrying two handfuls of peas. One little pea dropped out. He tried to pick it up, and split twenty. He tried to pick up the twenty, and split them all. Then he lost his temper, scattered the peas in all directions and ran away.
It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion, a stupid delusion.
A man’s every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.
If the thought ever comes to you that everything that you have thought about God is mistaken and that there is no God, do not be dismayed. It happens to many people. But do not think that the source of your unbelief is that there is no God.
Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
There are such repulsive faces in the world.
There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.