I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.

Hell is the inability to love.

People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.

In a way there's only a fine shade of difference between the healthy and the deranged.

I think everyone must love life more than anything else in the world.' 'Love life more than the meaning of it?' 'Yes, certainly. Love it regardless of logic, as you say. Yes, most certainly regardless of logic, for only then will I grasp its meaning. That's what I've been vaguely aware of for a long time. Half your work is done, Ivan: you love life. Now you must try to do the second half and you are saved.

They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.

Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.