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

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.

Nothing could be more pleasant than to live in solitude, enjoy the spectacle of nature, and occasionally read some book.

There are certain words which are nearer and dearer to a man than any others.

Let me warn you, if you start chasing after views, you’ll be left without bread and without views.

Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man.

But youth has a future. The closer he came to graduation, the more his heart beat. He said to himself: “This is still not life, this is only the preparation for life.

But wise is the man who disdains no character, but with searching glance explores him to the root and cause of all.

In the end dreams became his life, and his whole life thereafter took a strange turn: one might say he slept while waking and watched while asleep.

They don’t listen to me, they don’t hear me, they don’t see me.

How much savage coarseness is concealed in refined, cultivated manners.

We are all too often told by someone that we are too old, too young, too different, too much the same, and those comments can be devastating.

And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.

I’m planning a catastrophe.

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours.

The closer the collapse of the Empire, the crazier its laws are.

Aimlessness is a vice, and such drifting must not continue for him who would steer clear of catastrophe and destruction.

Come and sip from the cup of destruction.