A man’s real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.
Going home must be like going to render an account.
Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.
As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.
This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.
An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.
How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?
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.