“I have been too unhappy, I thought, it cannot last, being so unhappy, it would kill you”

“Happiness is the illusion of being happy, unhappiness is the fear of being it. A little bit of fear helps you to live in the light, too much strangles you in the dark.”

“All happy people are grateful. Ungrateful people cannot be happy. We tend to think that being unhappy leads people to complain, but it’s truer to say that complaining leads to people becoming unhappy.”

“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes. That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell. Everything passes.”

“A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.”

“As soon as something stops being fun, I think it’s time to move on. Life is too short to be unhappy. Waking up stressed and miserable is not a good way to live.”

“It wasn't about being happy or unhappy. I just didn't want to be me anymore.”

“The incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading" so that "he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.”

“It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.”

“I cannot kill. Unfortunately, there are so many who can and do kill. As I cannot kill I cannot authorize others to kill. Do you see? If you are buying from a butcher you are authorizing him to kill — kill helpless, dumb creatures, which neither I nor you could kill ourselves. So that I am for that reason a vegetarian, as most Russians are. For nine years I have been a vegetarian, and I shall be one — mind, I am a man with strong convictions — to the end of my life.”