“He remembered his mother's love for him, and his family's, and his friends', and the enemy's intention to kill him seemed impossible.”

“It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over." "Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.”

“Involuntarily it appeared to me that there, somewhere, was someone who amused himself by watching how I lived for thirty or forty years: learning, developing, maturing in body and mind, and how, having with matured mental powers reached the summit of life from which it all lay before me, I stood on that summit -- like an arch-fool -- seeing clearly that there is nothing in life, and that there has been and will be nothing. And he was amused... But whether that "someone" laughing at me existed or not, I was none the better off. I could give no reasonable meaning to any single action or to my whole life. I was only surprised that I could have avoided understanding this from the very beginning -- it has been so long known to all. Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me; nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort?... How can man fail to see this? And how go on living? That is what is surprising! One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.”

“Everything I know, I know because of love”

“I assure you that I sleep anywhere, and always like a dormouse.”

“If you could forget and forgive what happened. He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following phrase, "I have nothing to forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to love you.”"

“God gave the day, God gave the strength.”

“Slavery, you know, is nothing else than the unwilling labor of many. Therefore to get rid of slavery it is necessary that people should not wish to profit by the forced labor of others and should consider it a sin and a shame. But they go and abolish the external form of slavery and arrange so that one can no longer buy and sell slaves, and they imagine and assure themselves that slavery no longer exists, and do not see or wish to see that it does, because people still want and consider it good and right to exploit the labor of others.”

“Why is gambling forbidden while women in costumes which evoke sensuality are not forbidden? They are a thousand times more dangerous!”

“Send him to the devil, I'm busy.”

“I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.”

“In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.”

“Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal aims of humanity.

“The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind.”

“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”