“My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.”

In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer.

My piece of bread only belongs to me when I know that everyone else has a share, and that no one starves while I eat.

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

If you want to be happy, try only to please God, not people.

The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.

To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.

To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.

Debates conceal rather than reveal the truth. Truth is revealed in solitude.

It’s hard to love a woman and do anything.

If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

Without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us – there is no life.

Every heart has its own skeletons.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

Happiness is in your ability to love others.

Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.

Each person’s task in life is to become an increasingly better person.

Doubt tempers belief with sanity.

We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

I have supported my deviations with reasons; I did not stop at mere doubt; I have vanquished, I have uprooted,

I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul. God keep me, if only for the sake of those dear to me!

I would not be at all surprised to find that it was for gold that Cain committed the first murder. (It happened a very long time ago, and Holy Writ, though no doubt divinely inspired, is a trifle careless about details. God is not a historian).

As the egalitarianism of Marxism is attractive to many, socialism could have attracted many followers in America, anyway. But there is no doubt that it could not possibly have affected us so widely and so deeply as it has, had it not been heavily financed.

Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.

Belief is tricky because left to its own devices, it can court a kind of surety, an unquestioning allegiance that fears doubt and destroys difference.