Man is endowed with reason and the power to create, so that he may increase that which has been given him, but until now he has not created, but demolished.
The aim of fiction is honest and absolute truth.
To leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide yourself in a farmhouse is not life – it is egoism, laziness; it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free spirit.
So it is in life... In search of the truth, people make two steps forward and one step back. Sufferings, mistakes, and the tedium of life throw them back, but the thirst for truth and a stubborn will drive them on and on. And who knows? Maybe they’ll row their way to the real truth...
The fear of death is an animal passion which must be overcome. Only those who believe in a future life and tremble for sins committed, can logically fear death.
When a person expends the least possible amount of energy on a certain act, that is grace.
They say man only needs six feet of Earth. But it is a corpse, and not man, which needs these six feet.
Except for two or three older writers, all modern literature seems to me not literature but some sort of handicraft, which exists only so as to be encouraged, though one is reluctant to use its products.
There is nothing good in this world that does not have some filth in its origin.
As a rule, however fine and deep a phrase may be, it only affects the indifferent, and cannot fully satisfy those who are happy or unhappy.
If you could only see your face, your gestures! Oh, how tedious your life must be.
Not to sleep during the night means to be aware every moment of your abnormality, and therefore I wait impatiently for morning and daylight, when I have the right not to sleep.
But, as I was saying, life holds nothing for me; my race is run. I am old, I am tired, I am trivial; my sensibilities are dead. I could never attach myself to any one again.
People who have an official, professional relation to other men’s sufferings – for instance, judges, police officers, doctors – in course of time, through habit, grow so callous that they cannot, even if they wish it, take any but a formal attitude to their clients; in this respect they are not different from the peasant who slaughters sheep and calves in the back-yard, and does not notice the blood.
People say that a person needs six feet of earth. But in fact it’s a corpse that needs six feet of earth, not a person. People don’t need six feet of earth, or even a house in the country, but the whole globe, the whole of nature in its entirety, so they can have the space to express all the capacities and particularities of their free spirit.
You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.
Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.
The Lie which elates us is dearer than a thousand sober truths.
In your veins flows a mermaid’s blood, so be a mermaid.
Lonely people read a great deal, but say little and hear little.