The teaching of the church, theoretically astute, is a lie in practice and a compound of vulgar superstitions and sorcery.

We're asleep until we love.

The recognition of the sanctity of the life of every man is the first and only basis of all morality.

It's hard to love a woman and do anything.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

But that had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.

Here's my advice to you: don't marry until you can tell yourself that you've done all you could, and until you've stopped loving the women you've chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you'll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you're old and good for nothing...Otherwise all that's good and lofty in you will be lost.