The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe.
Why can’t you understand? The stars fall down now and then. The gaps have to be filled.
If we live in a state of constant fear, can we remain human?
Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!
I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it – from The Gulag Archipelago.
Every act of perception has an emotional coloring.
It’s quite enough to show a well-beaten dog the whip.
Scientific research? Only when not at the cost of ethics-and first of all, those of the researchers themselves.
When we feel that we are not sufficiently respected, we should ask ourselves whether we are living as we should.
A leader should not be a man who arbitrarily imported his own ideas but the essential focal point for a group of people who trusted one another and worked for a common aim.
The essence of life will never be captured by even the greatest of formulas.
I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.
If so far we have been unable to see clearly or to reflect the eternal lineaments of truth, is it not because we too are still moving towards some end-because we are still alive?
Thus, literature, together with language, preserves and protects a nation’s soul.
The same old caveman feeling-greed, envy, violence, and mutual hate, which along the way assumed respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial struggle, mass struggle, labor-union struggle-are tearing our world to pieces.
After all, man is a complicated being, why should he be explainable by logic?
A human being is all hope and impatience.
Morality is always higher than law and we cannot forget this ever.
There are defendants whom the judges are afraid of.
Generosity is a two-edged virtue for an artist – it nourishes his imagination but has a fatal effect on his routine.