Each must quietly and wisely discern what he is given to do. There are so many things to do around that you can never do them all.
The Duhobors * began with the burning of arms, and the revolutionaries with the purchase of bombs and brownings.
Society is established by consensus without violence, the state is established by violence.
To act in the field of ideas you have to follow an idea. Every man has a nuance, his point of view. And this (joining against your conviction to the conviction of another) is a voluntary slavery, worse than the former slavery.
The curse of famous writers is that everything they write is taken for granted.
The taste of wine is pleasant, the hangover is unpleasant.
A good woman is better than the best man, a bad woman is worse than the worst man.
The bombings are the indication of hatred towards power, towards power in general and towards the rich. It is a sign that life organized by violence, by force lived its living. (How Slavery Lived.)
How imposing is the written word! I read it and give it more importance than vorbei, but the reasons why he [the author] writes and why people talk are important. Here's what's important.
The disease of old age is the forgetting of recent things. But the quintessence of what has been experienced is remembered.
... In everyday life we have to change things that seem trivial. Here, I now go to my office and if I am not disturbed and do not judge you, I say to myself "Thank God" and I feel happy, I feel good. But if I lose my patience, I am unhappy with myself. To become better is the only joy, the only (possible) good.
As each man will pay for his sins, so will the nation. They bought the niggers, they enslaved them, and now they have the nigger problem, and they think it's a complicated problem.
Religious feeling needs quiet.
Consciousness changes. Everything tends towards union.
When we read parables to them, their [children's] attention is captivated more by the parable-story than by the moral truth that the parable explains.
In the conditions of this lack of moral principles, when it is preached that anyone can be killed, I am not surprised that people are killed, but that little is killed.
Humility, modesty are now forgotten, everyone considers themselves creators of destinies.
What a pity that mental and moral activity has become money-making!
Moses did not enter Canaan. And so it is. In material activity, man wants to see, and sees, the reward. In the spiritual, the reward is the activity itself, the planting of the seeds, but we don't have to see the fruits (nor do we need to see them).
My memory has warped, it's falling apart, but I wouldn't give up the person I used to be, the one with the good memory.
Man must be educated in the spirit, the ideal cannot exist in the body.
The old man that I am sees time in two ways. It passes quickly if I'm dealing with something external, it passes meet if I'm dealing with inner work.
In the doctrine of Confucius there are so many profound ideas and they are expressed so stupidly, obscurely.
Christ said that we must learn from children, they are pleased only with kindness.
We don't need to increase our income, we need to live more simply. It's easy for a single person, it's hard for a person with a family.
Life is only self-fulfilment. The Christian cannot be reconciled to himself (like the Mohammedan or the Jew who fulfill the commandments of their religion), he cannot be holy, neither was Christ himself. The Christian can only aim at the ideal.
Public opinion is the opinion of the majority, and the majority is always stupid. The mob inspires us with respect when several people say the same thing. We think there must be something wise in the middle…
God is only the object of the religious idea, not the religious idea.
The ideal is righteousness, and you, by the mere fact of speaking, are already deviating from it.
The purity of the soul, the ability to receive the Divine exists in all the Russian people, even in vagabonds.