Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!

There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in later years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home.

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.

My friends, ask gladness from God. Be glad as children, as birds in the sky. And let man's sin not disturb you in your efforts, do not feat that it will dampen your endeavor and keep it from being fulfilled, do not say, Sin is strong, impiety is strong, the bad environment is strong, and we are lonely and powerless, the bad environment will dampen us and keep our good endeavor from being fulfilled. Flee from such despondency, my children! There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for the sins of men.

I punish myself for my whole life, my whole life I punish.

After all, I quite naturally want to live in order to fulfill my whole capacity for living, and not in order to fulfill my reasoning capacity alone, which is no more than some one-twentieth of my capacity for living. What does reason know? It knows only what it has managed to learn (and it may never learn anything else; that isn't very reassuring, but why not admit it?), while human nature acts as a complete entity, with all that is in it, consciously or unconsciously; and though it may be wrong, it's nevertheless alive.

I cannot understand why the world is arranged as it is.