If I had had the power to prevent my own birth I should certainly never have consented to accept existence under such ridiculous conditions.

Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.

God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby's face.

The Russian soul is a dark place.

A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.

Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.

The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.

We degrade God too much, ascribing to him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand Him.

Why is it that when you awake to the world of realities you nearly always feel, sometimes very vividly, that the vanished dream has carried with it some enigma which you have failed to solve?

How can one deceive these dear little birds, when they look at one so sweetly and confidingly? I call them birds because there is nothing in the world better than birds!

Bah! You want to hear the vilest thing a man’s done and you want him to be a hero at the same time!

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.

The whole idea of awakening is about regaining self-trust. Through self-trust we remember how to be our own best guides.

This was not guilt: guilt is what you feel when you have done something wrong. What I felt was shame: I was what was wrong.

Dogs are happy with few things because they have already observed man who is unhappy with many things!

Compassion is the awareness of a deep bond between yourself and all creatures.

People are different from each other

The child saies nothing, but what it heard by the fire.

Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket.

The belief of our Reason is an Exercise of Faith, and Faith is an Act of Reason.

In living, as in art, rules are drawn from practice; not the other way around.