So go! E finita la comedia!
You have forgotten that a conviction, in itself, is nothing but a dead letter. You should have done something.
Those who suffer are egoistic, angry, unjust, and cruel, and less able to understand one another than really stupid people. Misfortune, far from uniting people, separates them, and even when it might be supposed that similarity of misfortune ought to bring people together, they show themselves a great deal more unjust and ruthless than do those who are comparatively content.
So far only one incontestable truth has been uttered about love: ‘This is a great mystery.
Though what is ‘Romeo and Juliet’ after all?” he added after a short pause. “The beauty of poetry and holiness of love are simply the roses under which they try to hide its rottenness. Romeo is just the same sort of animal as all the rest of us.
No one remembered Vladimir Semyonitch. He was utterly forgotten.
Like overfed boa constrictors, we noticed only the most glaring objects.
The phlegamtic female is a weepy, bug-eyed, fat, lumpy, fleshy German. She looks like a sack of flour. She is born in order to become a mother-in-law. That is her whole ambition.
And the wind, the wind! The bare birches and cherry-trees, unable to endure its rude caresses, bowed low down to the ground and wailed: “God, for what sin hast Thou bound us to the earth and will not let us go free?
But when I walk by the peasants’ woods which I have saved from cutting down, or when I hear the rustling of the young copse planted by my own hands, I realise that the climate is to some extent in my power, and that if in a thousand years man is to be happy I too shall have had some small hand in it.
But it is difficult to strike a match against a crumbling stone.
Pelageya sits down a bit further away in a patch of sun and, ashamed of her joy, covers her smiling mouth with her hand.
The real person, for whom everything is being done, is the devil.
In the search for truth man makes two steps forward and one step back. Suffering, mistakes, and weariness of life thrust them back, but the thirst for truth and stubborn will drive them on and on.
My illness is only that in twenty years I have only found one intelligent man in the whole town, and he is mad.
The hungry have a grievance against those who have enough, and those who have enough have a grievance against the hungry. Yes... hunger stupefies and maddens a man and makes him savage; hunger is not a potato. When a man is starving he uses bad language, and steals, and may do worse... One must realize that.
Whenever Germans or Englishmen get together, they talk about the crops, the price of wool, or their personal affairs. But for some reason or other when we Russians get together we never discuss anything but women and abstract subjects – but especially women.
Nobody asks her not to understand! It’s a lesson for these foreigners!
Vices which are punished by our legal code had not prevented Diogenes from being a philosopher and a teacher. Caesar and Cicero were profligates and at the same time great men. Cato in his old age married a young girl, and yet he was regarded as a great ascetic and a pillar of morality.
You are confusing two notions, “the solution of a problem” and “the correct posing of the question”. Only the second is essential for the artist.