I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.

That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.

Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing.

So as long as you can forget your body you are happy and the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it. Help us get rid of our bodies altogether.

I will wait and watch till the day of David at last shall be finished, and wisdom no more fox-faced, and the blood gets back its flame.

Men live in glad obedience to the masters they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine.

One should stick by one's soul, and by nothing else. In one's soul, one knows the truth from the untruth, and life from death. And if one betrays one's own soul-knowledge one is the worst of traitors.