I know you'll probably get angry with me for that, shout, stamp your feet: "speak just for yourself and your miseries in the underground, and don't go saying 'we all.'" Excuse me, gentleman, but I am not justifying myself with this allishness. As far as I myself am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway, and, what's more, you've taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves. So that I, perhaps, come out even more "living" than you.

.. But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that along with happiness, in the exact same way, in perfectly equal proportion, man also needs unhappiness

'Ever seen a leaf - a leaf from a tree?' 'Yes.' I saw one recently - a yellow one, a little green, wilted at the edges. Blown by the wind. When I was a little boy, I used to shut my eyes in winter and imagine a green leaf, with veins on it, and the sun shining ...' 'What's this - an allegory?' "No; why? Not an allegory - a leaf, just a leaf. A leaf is good. Everything's good.'

Sometimes a man is intensely, even passionately, attached to suffering — that is a fact.

To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.

There is no idea, no fact, which could not be vulgarized and presented in a ludicrous light.

I cannot truly imagine a truly great person who hasn't suffered.