Great Throughts Treasury

"Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you'll learn at how precious it is."

"Everybody, my friend, everybody lives for something better to come. That's why we want to be considerate of every man - who knows what's in him, why he was born and what he can do?"

"In the carriages of the past you can't go anywhere."

"When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid."

"Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself."

"We kill everybody, my dear. Some with bullets, some with words, and everybody with our deeds. We drive people into their graves, and neither see it nor feel it."

"The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul."

"Politics is something similar to the lower physiological functions, with the unpleasant difference that political functions are unavoidably carried out in public."

"You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better."

"The poor are always rich in children, and in the dirt and ditches of this street there are groups of them from morning to night, hungry, naked and dirty. Children are the living flowers of the earth, but these had the appearance of flowers that have faded prematurely, because they grew in ground where there was no healthy nourishment."

"When work is a pleasure, life is a joy. When work is a duty, life is slavery!"

"Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man."

"I do not care to see men better off – but better!"

"Everybody lives for something better to come. That's why we want to be considerate of every man— Who knows what's in him, why he was born and what he can do?"

"You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know. "

"Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future."

"When one loves somebody everything is clear— where to go, what to do— it all takes care of itself and one doesn't have to ask anybody about anything."

"Be good, be kind, be humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon those who have done you wrong."

"Truth doesn't always heal a wounded soul."

"The most beautiful words in the English langauge are 'not guilty'."

"And this was the end of my first friendship with one of that innumerable company of people who are foreigners in their own country, but who are in reality its finest sons...."

"Children are the living flowers of the earth."

"But I'm not to be caught with such poor bait! I'm a big fish, I am."

"A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains."

"All that is called Destiny or Fate is none other than the result of our thoughtlessness and our mistrust of ourselves; we should know that all that is created on earth is created by its sole Master and Laborer -- Man."

"If it is true that only misfortune can awaken a man's soul, it is a bitter truth, one that is hard to hear and accept, and it is only natural that many people deny it and say it is better for a man to live on in a trance than to wake up to torture."

"However low he may fall, a man can never deny himself the delight of feeling cleverer, more powerful or even better fed than his companions."

"Everywhere, within man and without, there is devastation, instability, chaos, and evidence of some prolonged rout."

"Every new time will give its law."

"In recalling my childhood I like to picture myself as a beehive to which various simple obscure people brought the honey of their knowledge and thoughts on life, generously enriching my character with their own experience. Often this honey was dirty and bitter, but every scrap of knowledge was honey all the same."

"In war it is necessary to kill as many people as possible -- such is the cynical logic of war. Brutality in a fight is unavoidable; have you seen how cruelly children fight in the streets?"

"Intellectual force is qualitatively the first and foremost productive force, and concern for its rapid growth should be the ardent concern of all classes."

"In the monotony of everyday existence grief comes as a holiday, and a fire is an entertainment. A scratch embellishes an empty face."

"Just think, reader, what will happen to you if the truth of a mad beast overpowers the sane truth of man?"

"It is quiet and peaceful here, the air is good, there are numerous gardens, and in them nightingales sing and spies lurk under the bushes."

"Once there was a crow, it flew from the field to the hill, from hedge to hedge, and lived its life. Then it died and rotted away. What's the sense in it? There just ISN'T any!"

"Let us not search for the guilty ones only among others, let us speak the bitter truth: we are all guilty ... each and every one of us."

"Many contemporary authors drink more than they write"

"One has to be able to count if only so that at fifty one doesn't marry a girl of twenty."

"One word of praise from a woman is dearer to me than a whole ode from a man."

"Politics is the soil in which the nettle of poisonous enmity, evil suspicions, shameless lies, slander, morbid ambitions, and disrespect for the individual grows rapidly and luxuriantly. Name anything bad in man and it is precisely in the soil of political struggle that it grows with particular liveliness and abundance."

"Our salvation is in work, but let us also take delight in that work."

"Our most merciless enemy is our past."

"Only mothers can think of the future - because they give birth to it in their children."

"Processing the human raw material is naturally more complicated than processing lumber."

"The doleful, ugly sounds became entangled in his whiskers."

"The illness of a doctor is always worse than the illnesses of his patients. The patients only feel, but the doctor, as well as feeling, has a pretty good idea of the destructive effect of the disease on his constitution. This is a case in which knowledge brings death nearer."

"The revolution has overthrown the monarchy, true! But perhaps this means that the revolution simply has driven the skin disease inside the organism."

"The more a human creature has tasted of bitter things the more it hungers after the sweet things of life."

"The intelligentsia ...was kept busy embroidering white stitches on the philosophical and ecclesiastical vestments of the bourgeoisie - that old and filthy fabric besmeared with the blood of toiling masses."