If you want to be happy, be happy.

Children: a torment and nothing more.

A battle is won by the side that is absolutely determined to win. Why did we lose the battle of Austerlitz? Our casualties were about the same as those of the French, but we had told ourselves early in the day that the battle was lost, so it was lost.

Besides, to fall out of love and in love at the same time is to love twice as deeply as one did before.

If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side! If it is not the right way, then show me another way; but if I stagger and lose the way, you must help me, you must keep me on the true path, just as I am ready to support you.

Pure and complete is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

Truth, like gold is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

Happiness does not depend on outward things but on the way we see them.

Love those you hate you.

Childhood candor... shall I ever find you again?

Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is common to everyone?

I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.

Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth.

He was one of those diplomats who like and know how to work, and, despite his laziness, he occasionally spent nights at his desk.

If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.

But if Christianity really gives peace, and we really want peace, patriotism is a survival from barbarous times, which must not only not be evoked and educated, as we now do, but which must be eradicated by all means, by means of preaching, persuasion, contempt, and ridicule.

A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard.
And the candle by which she had read the book that was filled with fears, with deceptions, with anguish, and with evil, flared up with greater brightness than she had ever known, revealing to her all that before was in darkness, then flickered, grew faint, and went out
forever.

Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her.

One must be cunning and wicked in this world.

Every heart has its own skeletons.