All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.

As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.

I used to be very revolutionary, but now I think that nothing can be gained by brute force. People must be drawn to good by goodness.

She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.

Everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common ground, has crumbled into dust and has been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganization of the whole of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that's left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself.

Departure beyond the borders of my country is for me equivalent to death.

No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries.