Quotes by Alekszandr Ivanovics Herzen

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It is easy to say that the only culprit of man's fate is himself, but how can you appreciate and weigh the part of man's fault and that of the environment in which he lives?

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The talent of education, the talent of patient love is rarer than all the others. It cannot be replaced either by mother's love, no matter how ardent, nor by dialectics, no matter how strong, argumentative.

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Suffering, pain are a call to battle, they are the wake-up call of life, drawing attention to a danger.

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Terrible crimes have terrible consequences.

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The theater is the supreme court in solving life's problems.

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Only love gives rise to something lasting and alive, and pride is barren, because it needs nothing but itself.

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Ask to be given, instead of love for humanity, a hatred against all that lies in the way and prevents you from moving forward.

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There are no difficult subjects, but only a bunch of things that we simply do not know, even more, that we know poorly, incoherently, fragmentarily, even erroneously. This false information keeps us in place longer and deviates us more than what we don't know.

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Respect for the truth is the beginning of wisdom.

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There is no such thing as chronic happiness, just like there is no ice that won't melt.

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I consider the condition of the people whose young generation has no youth to be a great misfortune; we have already understood that one youth is not enough for this.

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I have lived through all the phases of family life and seen all the fragility of blood ties; they are strong when supported by a spiritual bond…

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A man possessed by a strong passion is a terrible egotist.

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Man is called into the social-historical world, morally free and positively active; he has not only understanding but also will, which can be called positive reason, creative reason.

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Man cannot refuse to participate in a human act done near him; he must act in his place and in his time—this is his universal vocation.

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A man without a heart is a cold thinking machine, without family, without friends, without country; the heart is a beautiful and indispensable foundation of spiritual development.

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A private life, which knows nothing of what passes beyond the threshold of its own house, however fulfilled it may be, is still poor.

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Progress is an inherent property of conscious development that has never ceased; it is the active memory and perfection of people through social life.

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Happiness is not complete if there is disorder; complete happiness is calm as a sea in calm summer weather.

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Under the influence of the petty bourgeoisie everything changed. Chivalrous honor was replaced by accounting honesty, elegant manners, ceremonial manners, politeness, affected character, pride, suspicion.

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The first love is so fragrant that it forgets the difference between the sexes, being also a passionate friendship.

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Nothing is done by itself, without effort and will, without sacrifice and work. Human will, the will of one strong man is enormous.

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There is no people in history that can be considered a herd of animals, just as there is no people that deserves to be considered an assembly of the elect.

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There is no thought that is impossible to express simply and clearly.

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A little frightened and disturbed love becomes more tender, more caring, from the selfishness of the two it becomes not only the selfishness of the three, but also a self-denial of the two for a third; a family begins with children.

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We cannot set men free on the outside, any more than they are free on the inside. Strange as it may seem, but experience shows that it is easier for people to face the burden of slavery than the gift of excessive freedom.

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Justice means nothing to a man who is not possessed by a passion.

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To preach from the pulpit, to charm from the platform, to teach from the pulpit is much easier than raising a child.

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Forgiving enemies is a beautiful deed; but an even more beautiful, more human deed is the understanding of enemies, because understanding is also forgiveness, justification, and reconciliation.

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Old age has its beauty, which does not exude passion and drive, but peace and tranquility...

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Cohabitation is a terrible thing in itself, which has ruined half the marriages. Living closely together, people are too close to each other, see each other in too much detail, too piecemeal and, unnoticed, tear petal by petal, all the flowers of the aura that surrounds a personality with poetry and grace.

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The word "selfishness", like the word "love", is too general: there can be both a base love and a supreme selfishness. The egoism of an evolved and rational man is noble, representing his love for science, art, for his neighbor, for a larger life, for independence; the love of a limited savage, even the love of Othello, is supreme selfishness.

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The most cruel and relentless of all people, prone to hatred and persecution, are the ultra-religious.

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The Russian government, like providence in reverse, improves not the future, but the past.

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Religion is the essential bridle for the masses, a massive intimidation of the simple, a screen of colossal dimensions that prevents the people from seeing clearly what is happening on earth, making them look up to heaven.

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Waste carries a limit in itself. It ends with the last ruble and the last loan. Avarice is boundless and always at the beginning of its realm; after ten million, she begins, sighing, to collect the eleventh.

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Naturally, people are selfish, because they are personalities; how can they be themselves if they have no clear consciousness of his personality? We are selfish, and therefore we seek independence, well-being, recognition of our rights, we look forward to love, we seek activity, and we cannot deny others, without apparent contradiction, the same rights.

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Vain answers kill justified questions and distract the mind from the given situation.

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Isn't that why people torture their children, because they find it so hard to raise them and so easy to whip them? Do we not take revenge by punishment for our incapacity?

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Our power lies in the power of thought, in the power of truth, in the power of the word.

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A personality must deny itself to become a vessel of truth, a personality must forget itself so as not to embarrass the truth with its person.

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What happiness for a man to die in time, when he can neither leave the scene nor go forward.

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Art accommodates itself more easily to poverty and luxury than to prosperity. The whole character of the petty bourgeoisie, with its own good and bad, is disgusting and small to art.

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The life that leaves no signs of duration, erases itself with every step forward.

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There is narrow, dirty, dirty selfishness, just as there is dirty, dirty, narrow love.

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Friendship must be solid, capable of withstanding all the changes of temperature and all the bumps of the bumpy road on which good and decent people travel through life.

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The real interest lies not in killing selfishness in words and praising brotherhood, but in harmoniously and freely combining two inalienable beginnings of human life.

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Even a simple material work cannot be done with love, if we know it is in vain...

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Where the word has not perished, there the deed has not yet perished either.

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Someone loves because he loves and does not love because he does not love - the logic of feelings and passions is short.

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Love is a high word, the harmony of creation demands it, without it there is no life and it cannot exist.

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Spectacular things are done by spectacular means. Only nature does great things for free.

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Science demands the whole of man, without half-measures, ready to give it everything and receive as a reward the heavy cross of awake knowledge.

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Science is a power, it discovers the relationships between objects, their laws and interactions.

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You must have the strength of character to say and do the same thing.

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Tortured love is not true love...

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Moralists speak of selfishness as a bad habit without asking whether a man can still be a man after he has lost his living sense of personality.

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The petty bourgeoisie means the democratization of the aristocracy and the aristocratization of democracy.

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Men fear the slavery of the mind, but they fear twice as much the lack of authority. External authority is incomparably more convenient: the man has done a bad deed - he is reprimanded, punished, and from this moment he is as clean as if he had done nothing.

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Love pushes the boundaries of individual existence and brings to consciousness all the joys of life; through love, life admires itself; love is an apotheosis of life.

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Love and friendship are a mutual echo: they give as much as they get.

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In nature, nothing breaks out and nothing appears in a completely finished form.

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In science, there is no other way to success than the sweat of the brow; neither startups, nor fantasy, nor wholehearted aspiration is a substitute for work.

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There is nothing in the world more devastating and unbearable than inaction and waiting.

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In a petty bourgeois the personality is hidden or not manifested because it is not the most important thing: the main things are the goods and business; the main one is wealth.

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To be human in human society is not a heavy responsibility at all, but a simple evolution of an inner requirement; no one says that the bee has a sacred duty to make honey; she does it because she is a bee.

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Without equality there is no marriage. A wife excluded from all her husband's interests, a stranger to them, who does not share them, is a concubine, a housekeeper, a nanny, but not a wife in the full and noble sense of the word.

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People who fast and are always grumpy have always seemed suspicious to me; if they do not pretend, then they suffer either from disorders of the stomach or of the mind.

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The question: "Can there be a soul without a body?" it contains a ridiculous judgment, which precedes the question, and which is based on the fact that the soul and the body are two different things. What would you say to a man who asked you, "Can a black cat leave a room and the color black remain?" You would think him crazy, but both questions are exactly the same.

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Our enemies have never separated words from deeds, and they have punished for words not only in the same way, but often more severely than for deeds.

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All public and political matters, all fantastic and heroic interests tend, as a people perfects itself, to turn into matters of national welfare.

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All religions have based morality on submission, that is, on voluntary slavery.

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A slave is the least selfish.

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The whole life of mankind was consistently preserved in the book: the tribes, the people, the states disappeared, and the book remained.

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Every immoral act done deliberately offends the mind; the reproaches of conscience remind a man that he has acted like a slave, like an animal.

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All the aspirations and efforts of nature are perfected by man; they tend to him, they flow into him like an ocean.

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Religion is a tool to keep the masses in check, a tried and tested tool of their intimidation, a gigantic Spanish wall that prevents the people from seeing clearly what is happening on earth and forces them to raise their eyes to heaven.

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The book is a testament of one generation to another, a dying old man's advice to a coming-of-age teenager, an order that the watchman passes on to his successor.