Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.
Category Archive: 1909
When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.
Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.
A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.
Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man, but they don’t bite everybody.
With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed.
The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.
When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.
On a royal birthday every house must fly a flag, or the owner would be dragged to a police station and be fined twenty-five rubles.
There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the death of man’s faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.