“Mother always said that if one must do something unpleasant, one should do it wholeheartedly and not waste effort on regret.”

“One must not always think so much about what one should do, but rather what one should be. Our works do not ennoble us; but we must ennoble our works.”

“One must be something in order to do something.”

“To be an individual and to be yourself you don't have to do a thing. Culture demands that you should be something other than what you are. What a tremendous amount of energy — the will, the effort — we waste trying to become that! If that energy is released, what is it that we can't do? How simple it would be for every one of us to live in this world!”

“I go to the typical state school and try to infiltrate it. Yes!... One can do something in the institutions in trying to infiltrate them, and outside one can do something to set a model in place... One must work with divers methods anyway. One must always carry on with what is possible.”

“Rather than reacting to every risk we hear and see, we should make an effort to discern which ones we can do something about.”

“Remorse — Regret that one waited so long to do it.”

“Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws — always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop. Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them for their own good.”

“I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure.
I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.”

“Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.”