It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.

People's destinies are so different. Some people drag along, unnoticed and boring—they're all alike, and they're all unhappy. Then there are others, like for instance you—you're one in a million. You're happy—

I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest.

Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.

I have the feeling that I've seen everything, but failed to notice the elephants.

The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them.