“A time of famine and poverty will come and the people as a whole as well as every individual in it will suffer.”

Keep not money, but keep good people’s company.

Of course, Alexander the Great was a hero, but why smash the chairs?

We have the marvelous gift of making everything insignificant.

There are passions that it is not for man to choose.

There exists a kind of laughter which is worthy to be ranked with the higher lyric emotions and is infinitely different from the twitching of a mean merrymaker.

A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe.

What is stronger in us – passion or habit? Or are all the violent impulses, all the whirl of our desires and turbulent passions, only the consequence of our ardent age, and is it only through youth that they seem deep and shattering?

I shall laugh my bitter laugh.

You can’t imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays.

I saw that I’d get nowhere on the straight path, and that to go crookedly was straighter.

Gambling is the great leveller. All men are equal- at cards.

They’re thinking of turning the peasant into an educated man. Why, first of all they should make him a good and prosperous farmer and then he’ll learn all that is necessary for him to know.

Everywhere across whatever sorrows of which our life is woven, some radiant joy will gaily flash past.

Man is such a wondrous being that it is never possible to count up all his merits at once. The more you study him, the more new particulars appear, and their description would be endless.

As you pass from the tender years of youth into harsh and embittered manhood, make sure you take with you on your journey all the human emotions! Don’t leave them on the road, for you will not pick them up afterwards!

Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all

We’ve painted ourselves into a corner where the only choice is real nightmare – triage, epidemic disease, famine, fascism, the collapse of human rights – or a leap to an entirely different level. We’ve taken business-as-usual off the menu. Now only the extreme possibilities loom.

They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide…?

I find by my calculations, which are according to revealed inspiration, that the sword of death is now approaching us, in the shape of pestilence, war more horrible than has been known in three lifetimes, and famine.

Near the gates and within two cities there will be scourges the like of which was never seen: famine within plague, people put out by steel, crying to the great immortal God for relief.