An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.
A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.
Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.
Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love – and to put its trust in life.
As to honor – you know – it’s a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn’t theirs.
Don’t you forget what’s divine in the Russian soul and that’s resignation.
Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.
Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank – but that’s not the same thing.
There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.
He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination – you know.
Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.
Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.
To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.
The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth.
A man’s most open actions have a secret side to them.
The Westerly Wind asserting his sway from the south-west quarter is often like a monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death.
A fool has more ideas than a wise man can foresee.
The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly Weather, is an impassive-faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his back for a treacherous stab.