I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back.

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.

There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.

If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one’s reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself.

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.

Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.

We lost because we told ourselves we lost.

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.

He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style.

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.

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.

Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can’t eat it.

We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.

The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their approbation, but deeds can be done only for God.

And all people live, Not by reason of any care they have for themselves, But by the love for them that is in other people.

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

If you want to be happy, be.

Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.

All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.

War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.

Boredom: the desire for desires.

I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back.

War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.