Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, can shatter it. It is all the very nature of the soul. Love is life. All, all that I understand, I understand only because of love. All is bound up in love alone. Love is God and dying means for me a particle of love, to go back to the universal and eternal source of love.

To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.

To sin is a human business, to justify sins is a devilish business.

Better to know a few things which are good and necessary than many things which are useless and mediocre

The best generals I have known were... stupid or absent-minded men. Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes - love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust.

From the self-confidence with which he spoke no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.

Power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.