We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.
Much unhappiness has come from things left unsaid.
The essence of any religion lies solely in the answer to the question: why do I exist, and what is my relationship to the infinite universe that surrounds me?
The life of our class, of the wealthy and the learned, was not only repulsive to me but had lost all meaning. The sum of our action and thinking, of our science and art, all of it struck me as the overindulgences of a spoiled child.
The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their approbation, but deeds can be done only for God.
Debates conceal rather than reveal the truth. Truth is revealed in solitude.
The ideas of the wise have been tested by centuries. Everything medium is lost and only original, deep and useful things are left.
If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one’s reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.
As often happens between men who have chosen different pursuits, each, while in argument justifying the other’s activity, despised it in the depth of his heart.
We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there’s no altering that.
It seems as though mankind has forgotten the laws of its divine Saviour, Who preached love and forgiveness of injuries – and that men attribute the greatest merit to skill in killing one another.
I feel not only that I cannot disappear, as nothing disappears in the world, but that I will always be and have always been. I feel that, besides me, above me, spirits live, and that in this world there is truth.
What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world!
Meanwhile spring arrived. My old dejection passed away and gave place to the unrest which spring brings with it, full of dreams and vague hopes and desires.
And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.
We should show life neither as it is or as it ought to be, but only as we see it in our dreams.
She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.
If once we admit, be it for a single hour or in a single instance, that there can be anything more important than compassion for a fellow human being, then there is no crime against man that we cannot commit with an easy conscience.
A holy spirit lives within you.
India, which is the nursery of the great faiths of the world.