The whole life of mankind was consistently preserved in the book: the tribes, the people, the states disappeared, and the book remained.
Every immoral act done deliberately offends the mind; the reproaches of conscience remind a man that he has acted like a slave, like an animal.
Where the word has not perished, there the deed has not yet perished either.
Spectacular things are done by spectacular means. Only nature does great things for free.
Even a simple material work cannot be done with love, if we know it is in vain...
The real interest lies not in killing selfishness in words and praising brotherhood, but in harmoniously and freely combining two inalienable beginnings of human life.
Friendship must be solid, capable of withstanding all the changes of temperature and all the bumps of the bumpy road on which good and decent people travel through life.
There is narrow, dirty, dirty selfishness, just as there is dirty, dirty, narrow love.
The life that leaves no signs of duration, erases itself with every step forward.
Art accommodates itself more easily to poverty and luxury than to prosperity. The whole character of the petty bourgeoisie, with its own good and bad, is disgusting and small to art.
What happiness for a man to die in time, when he can neither leave the scene nor go forward.
A personality must deny itself to become a vessel of truth, a personality must forget itself so as not to embarrass the truth with its person.
Someone loves because he loves and does not love because he does not love - the logic of feelings and passions is short.
Love is a high word, the harmony of creation demands it, without it there is no life and it cannot exist.
Love and friendship are a mutual echo: they give as much as they get.
Love pushes the boundaries of individual existence and brings to consciousness all the joys of life; through love, life admires itself; love is an apotheosis of life.
Men fear the slavery of the mind, but they fear twice as much the lack of authority. External authority is incomparably more convenient: the man has done a bad deed - he is reprimanded, punished, and from this moment he is as clean as if he had done nothing.
The petty bourgeoisie means the democratization of the aristocracy and the aristocratization of democracy.
Moralists speak of selfishness as a bad habit without asking whether a man can still be a man after he has lost his living sense of personality.
Tortured love is not true love...
You must have the strength of character to say and do the same thing.
Science is a power, it discovers the relationships between objects, their laws and interactions.
Science demands the whole of man, without half-measures, ready to give it everything and receive as a reward the heavy cross of awake knowledge.
Our power lies in the power of thought, in the power of truth, in the power of the word.
Isn't that why people torture their children, because they find it so hard to raise them and so easy to whip them? Do we not take revenge by punishment for our incapacity?
We cannot set men free on the outside, any more than they are free on the inside. Strange as it may seem, but experience shows that it is easier for people to face the burden of slavery than the gift of excessive freedom.
A little frightened and disturbed love becomes more tender, more caring, from the selfishness of the two it becomes not only the selfishness of the three, but also a self-denial of the two for a third; a family begins with children.
There is no thought that is impossible to express simply and clearly.
There is no people in history that can be considered a herd of animals, just as there is no people that deserves to be considered an assembly of the elect.
Nothing is done by itself, without effort and will, without sacrifice and work. Human will, the will of one strong man is enormous.