I wanted to pray for an hour, but I keep thinking and thinking, and always sick thoughts, and my head aches - what is the use of praying? - it's only a sin! It is strange, too, that I am not sleepy: in great, too great sorrow, after the first outbursts one is always sleepy. Men condemned to death, they say, sleep very soundly on the last night. And so it must be, it si the law of nature, otherwise their strength would not hold out... I lay down on the sofa but I did not sleep...

Hell is the inability to love.

And yet I am convinced that man will never give up true suffering- that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole root of consciousness.

Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.

I want to suffer and be purified by suffering!

I cannot truly imagine a truly great person who hasn't suffered.

Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.