“A hundred suspicions don't make a proof.”

“[The Devil] And after all, who knows whether proof of the devil is also proof of God? I want to join an idealist society and form an opposition within it: 'I'm a realist,' I'll say, 'not a materialist,' heh, heh!”

“Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.”

“Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it's not supposed to exist! They don't recognise that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That's why they instinctively dislike history, 'nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it,' and they explain it all as stupidity! That's why they so dislike the living process of life; they don't want a living soul! The living soul demands life, the soul won't obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde! But what they want though it smells of death and can be made of india-rubber, at least is not alive, has no will, is servile and won't revolt! And it comes in the end to their reducing everything to the building of walls and the planning of rooms and passages in a phalanstery! The phalanstery is ready, indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery--it wants life, it hasn't completed its vital process, it's too soon for the graveyard! You can't skip over nature by logic.”

“You are going to perform a virtuous deed, but you don't even believe in virtue--that's what makes you angry and torments you, that's why you're so vindictive.”

“You can't be angry with me, because I am a hundred times more severely punished than you, if only by the fact that I shall never see you again.”

“The harmonious man, it needs to be said, hardly exists at all; out of many tens, even hundreds of thousands perhaps one or two at most are encountered, and even then in rather feeble versions.”