What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.

Humanity unceasingly strives forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid.

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.

I now understand that my welfare is only possible if I acknowledge my unity with all the people of the world without exception.

It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writings than to put one principle into practice.

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.

God forgive me everything!' she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling.