A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains.

It is quiet here and restful and the air is delicious. There are gardens everywhere and police spies lie in the bushes. There are nightingales in every garden, but police spies only in mine, I think. They sit under my windows in the darkness of the night and try to get a glimpse of how I spread sedition in Russia.

A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains.

God is a complex of ideas formed by the tribe, the nation, and humanity, which awake and organize social feelings and aim to link the individual to society and to bridle the zoological individualism.

In the carriages of the past, you can't go anywhere.

If it is true that only misfortune can awaken a man's soul, it is a bitter truth, one that is hard to hear and accept, and it is only natural that many people deny it and say it is better for a man to live on in a trance than to wake up to torture.

One has to be able to count if only so that at fifty one doesn't marry a girl of twenty.