A wife’s a worry, a non-wife’s even worse.
It’s not so much that he can’t fall in love, but he has not the weakness necessary.
Well, pray if you like, only you’d do better to use your judgment.
I don’t want to prove anything; I merely want to live, to do no one harm but myself. I have the right to do that, haven’t I?
No one is satisfied with his position, but every one is satisfied with his wit.
There are always so many conjectures as to the issue of any event that, whatever the outcome, there will always be people to say: ‘I said then that it would be so’
I can’t understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.
The best method for a given teacher is the one which is most familiar to the teacher.
It is a rude feeling, because it is natural only to people standing on the lowest level of morality, and expecting from other nations such outrages as they themselves are ready to inflict.
It is a harmful feeling, because it disturbs advantageous and joyous, peaceful relations with other peoples, and above all produces that governmental organization under which power may fall, and does fall, into the, hands of the worst men.
Conceit is incompatible with understanding.
Man is meant for happiness and this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of his existence.
Christianity, with its doctrine of humility, of forgiveness, of love, is incompatible with the state, with its haughtiness, its violence, its punishment, its wars.
Not all of life’s roads are set fast, for a man may do this or a man may do that and not even the gods know the mind of a man.
We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us.
The teaching of the church, theoretically astute, is a lie in practice and a compound of vulgar superstitions and sorcery.
Where is there any book of the law so clear to each man as that written in his heart?
The artist’s mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations.
But the peasants – how do the peasants die?
Art can compel people freely, gladly, and spontaneously to sacrifice themselves in the service of man.