For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments.

It is a law of nature that every decent man on earth is bound to be a coward and a slave

The perpetration of a crime is accompanied by illness!

A man would still do something out of sheer perversity - he would create destruction and chaos - just to gain his point...and if all this could in turn be analyzed and prevented by predicting that it would occur, then man would deliberately go mad to prove his point.

.. 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

But try getting blindly carried away by your feelings, without reasoning, without a primary cause, driving consciousness away at least for a time; start hating, or fall in love, only so as not to sit with folded arms.

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.