The Russian soul is a dark place.

For example, I'm terribly proud. I'm as mistrustful and as sensitive as a hunchback or a dwarf; but, in truth, I've experienced some moments when if someone had slapped my face, I might even have been grateful for it. I'm being serious. I probably would have been able to derive a peculiar sort of pleasure from it-the pleasure of despair, naturally, but the most intense pleasures occur in despair, especially when you're very acutely aware of the hopelessness of your own predicament.

How good life is when one does something good and just!

I've long stopped worrying about who invented whom - God man or man God.

There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words. Your thought, even a bad one, while it is with you, is always more profound, but in words it is more ridiculous and dishonorable.

Until you have become really, in actual fact, as brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass.

Human laziness makes people pigeonhole one another at first site so that they find nothing in common with one another.