“The more destruction there is everywhere, the more it shows the activity of town authorities.”

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

The experience of ages has shown that a man who works on the land is purer, nobler, higher, and more moral… Agriculture should be at the basis of everything. That’s my idea.

For contemporary judgment does not recognize that much depth of soul is needed to light up the picture drawn from contemptible life and elevate it into a pearl of creation.

Burn every memory that does not help you grow. Destruction, too, can be necessary.

Remember, there are beginnings in endings, through destruction there comes life.

People talk about love like it is patient and kind. Love is also dark. It is ferocious and angry and destructive.

We can never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

Suicide is not an answer, it’s destruction.

Love is a flame that burns everything other than itself. It is the destruction of all that is false and the fulfillment of all that is true.

For me, love carries the seeds of its own destruction.

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.