“Boredom is the root of all evil.”

The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.

The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.

The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.

I am convinced that God is love.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

My standpoint is armed neutrality.

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.

Once you are born in this world you’re old enough to die.

The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, ‘Create silence’.

Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth — look at the dying man’s struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.

Don’t forget to love yourself.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand.

The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.

My sorrow is my castle.

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.

Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

There’s too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.

Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream.

There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.

While truth is always bitter, pleasantness waits upon evildoing.

Money is the root of all evil, and yet it is such a useful root that we cannot get on without it any more than we can without potatoes.

A great cause of evil in the world is that men seldom think themselves criminal if they offer the same injustice to others that has been successfully practiced on themselves.

I have no room for monsters and cowards claiming to be something they’re not, who lie to get what they want.