Everything will come in due course, if you have the gumption to wait for it.

To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.

Here is a commandment for you: seek happiness in sorrow. Work, work tirelessly.

they may all be drunk at my place, but they're all honest, and though we do lie-because I lie, too-in the end we'll lie our way to the truth

To study the meaning of man and of life — I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.

Generally speaking, our prisoners were capable of loving animals, and if they had been allowed they would have delighted to rear large numbers of domestic animals and birds in the prison. And I wonder what other activity could better have softened and refined their harsh and brutal natures than this. But it was not allowed. Neither the regulations nor the nature of the prison made it possible.

Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.