You ask me what life is. That's like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there's nothing more to know.

I don't like being successful; the subjects which sit in my head are annoyed and jealous of what has already been written.

A person loves to talk about his illnesses although that is the least interesting part of his life.

The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.

Not one of our mortal gauges is suitable for evaluating non-existence, for making judgments about that which is not a person.

Life has gone by as if I never lived

The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection.