“The soul is healed by being with children.”

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.

The darker the night, the brighter the stars, The deeper the grief, the closer is God!

Beauty will save the world.

To love someone means to see them as God intended them.

To love someone means to see them as God intended them.

This is my last message to you: in sorrow, seek happiness.

To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all of this. I think work is the best.

It is a strange thing ,that every child is born with a closed hand , and every body dies with an open hand.

The majority of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all.

Spending time with children reminds you what a happy place the world can be.

Do not raise your children the way your parents raised you; they were born for a different time.

All my films are all my children.

Falling in love, you remain a child; rising in love, you mature. By and by love becomes not a relationship, it becomes a state of your being. Not that you are in love – now you are love.

I am convinced that the norm in Russia should become a family with three children.