To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.

A Russian should rejoice if Poland, the Baltic Provinces, Finland, Armenia, should be separated, freed from Russia; so with an Englishman in regard to Ireland, India and other possessions; and each should help to do this, because the greater the state, the more wrong and cruel is its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded. Therefore, if we really wish to be what we profess to be, we must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening, and help this forward with all our might.

The artist's mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations.

My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.

He remembered his mother's love for him, and his family's, and his friends', and the enemy's intention to kill him seemed impossible.

War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war.

There are always so many conjectures as to the issue of any event that, whatever the outcome, there will always be people to say: 'I said then that it would be so'