‎Honoured sir, poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkeness is not a virtue, and that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary--never--no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary as I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself.

You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I won't be wiser?

For if there's no everlasting God, there's no such thing as virtue, and there's no need of it.

It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.

You can't be angry with me, because I am a hundred times more severely punished than you, if only by the fact that I shall never see you again.

Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.

But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.