Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.

We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.

And all people live, Not by reason of any care they have for themselves, But by the love for them that is in other people.

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.

Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself.

The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their approbation, but deeds can be done only for God.

Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.

Joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.

War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.

An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person’s main task in life – becoming a better person.

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.

The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can’t eat it.

The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.

I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back.