- Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
- History would be a wonderful thing if only it were true.
- If goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness; if it has a consequence — a reward of some kind — it is again not goodness. Therefore goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.
- If anyone doubts the inseparability of wisdom and self-denial, let him look at how, at the other extreme, stupidity and egoism are always joined.
- True wisdom is not wordy.
- What has been important, and always will be, is only that which is necessary for the good not of one man but of all people.
- Power as violence arises when we acknowledge as higher something that is not higher according to the demands of the heart and the mind.
- To fight violence with violence is to put a new violence in the place of the old… However terrible and hard the position of a man who lives a Christian life amid a life based on violence, he has no way out but struggle and self-sacrifice — self-sacrifice to the end.
- All thoughts that have huge consequences are simple.
- Every thought expressed in words is a force whose action is unlimited.
- The chief requirement of all art is a sense of proportion.
- Egoism is madness. Madness is egoism.
- One of the most harmful and dangerous thoughts is “Everybody does it.”
- Do not resist evil, but do not take part in evil yourself… and no one in this world will succeed in making you a slave.
- One of the most common and widespread superstitions is that every man has his definite qualities, that he is kind, cruel, wise, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic, or the reverse; but it would not be true to say of one that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is cruel or stupid. And yet we always divide people in that way. And that is not right.
- People are like rivers: the water is the same in all, and everywhere the same, but each river is now narrow, now swift, now wide, now still, now clear, now cold, now muddy, now warm. So it is with men. Every man carries in himself the germs of every human quality, and sometimes one manifests itself, sometimes another, and he often seems unlike himself, remaining all the while the same man. In some people these changes are particularly sharp.
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