But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure? Answer: Of himself. Well, so I will talk about myself.

Just take a look around you: Blood is flowing in rivers and in such a jolly way you’d think it was champagne.

I walked along Nevsky Avenue.Actually it was more torture, humiliation, and bilious irritation than a stroll.

I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.

We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast?

At first, art imitates life. Then life will imitate art.Then life will find its very existence from the arts.

Love to throw yourself on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love.

There is nothing more alluring to man than freedom of conscience, but neither is there anything more agonizing.

Nothing is more seductive for a man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.

But gamblers know how a man can sit for almost twenty-four hours at cards, without looking to right, or to left.

Love a man, even in his sin, for that love is a likeness of the divine love, and is the summit of love on earth.

Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.

For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?

Civilization merely develops man's capacity for a greater variety of sensations, and ... absolutely nothing else.

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.

When . . . in the course of all these thousands of years has man ever acted in accordance with his own interests?

Yes, that's right... love should come before logic ... Only then will man come to understand the meaning of life.

We are born dead, and we are becoming more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it.

Here my tears are falling, Nastenka. Let them flow, let them flow - they don't hurt anybody. They will dry Nastenka.

For all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.

But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease.

One man doesn't believe in god at all, while the other believes in him so thoroughly that he prays as he murders men!

Life is what matters, life alone - the continuous, eternal process of discovering life - and not the discovery itself.

Human laziness makes people pigeonhole one another at first site so that they find nothing in common with one another.

One must love life before loving its meaning ... yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning can console us.

Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.

The more you succeed in loving, the more you'll be convinced at the existence of God and the immortality of your soul.

I sometimes think love consists precisely of the voluntary gift by the loved object of the right to tyrannize over it.

For a woman, all resurrection, all salvation, from whatever perdition, lies in love; in fact, it is her only way to it.

Of course I shall go astray often...for who does not make mistakes? But I cannot go far wrong for I have seen the truth.

In sinning, each man sins against all, and each man is at least partly guilt for another's sin. There is no isolated sin.

You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I won't be wiser?

What is most vile and despicable about money is that it even confers talent. And it will do so until the end of the world.

In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.

The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him.

Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless.

He who desires to see the living God face-to-face should not seek him in the empty, firmament of his mind, but in human love.

In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.

If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man ... just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything? Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.

Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.

Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.

Whatever distinguishes one lump of flesh from another when we're alive, we're all the same once we're dead. Just used-up shells.

Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.

I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.

Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!

It is necessary that every man have at least somewhere to go. For there are times when one absolutely must go at least somewhere!

I wanted to discuss the suffering of humanity in general, but perhaps we'd better confine ourselves to the sufferings of children.

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