Who ever told you there is no such thing in the world as real, true, everlasting love? May the liar have his despicable tongue cut out!
What would your good be doing if there were no evil, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? After all, shadows are cast by objects and people. There is the shadow of my sword. But there are also shadows of trees and living creatures. Would you like to denude the earth of all the trees and all the living beings in order to satisfy your fantasy of rejoicing in the naked light?
How sad, ye Gods, how sad the world is at evening, how mysterious the mists over the swamps! You will know it when you have wandered astray in those mists, when you have suffered greatly before dying, when you have walked through the world carrying an unbearable burden. You know it too when you are weary and ready to leave this earth without regret; its mists; its swamps and its rivers; ready to give yourself into the arms of death with a light heart, knowing that death alone can comfort you.
I don’t have any special talents, just an ordinary desire to live like a human being.
Why do smart people exist, if not to figure out convoluted problems?
Clever people have been pointing out for a long time that happiness is like good health: when it’s there, you don’t notice it. But when the years have passed, how you do remember happiness, oh, how you do remember it!
She had a passion for all people who did anything to perfection.
That’s really bad,” concluded the host, “say what you will, but there’s something evil lurking in men who avoid wine, games, the society of delightful women, table talk. Such people are either gravely ill or secretly hate those around them. True, exceptions are possible. Among those who have sat down with me at the banqueting table, there have sometimes been some astonishing scoundrels! And so, I’m listening to why you’re here.
You spoke your words as though you denied the very existence of the shadows or of evil. Think, now: where would your good be if there were no evil and what would the world look like without shadow?
What point is there in dying in a ward, listening to the moans and rasps of the terminally ill? Wouldn’t it be better to spend the twenty-seven thousand on a banquet, then, after taking poison, depart for the other world to the sound of violins, surrounded by intoxicated beautiful women and dashing friends?
I, the unfortunate Doctor Polyakov, who became addicted to morphine in February of this year, warn anyone who may suffer the same fate not to attempt to replace morphine with cocaine. Cocaine is a most foul and insidious poison. Yesterday Anna barely managed to revive me with camphor injections and today I am half dead.
It’s nice to hold on to a holiday midnight a little longer than usual.
Eh, Nikanor Ivanovich!′ the unknown man exclaimed soulfully. ‘What are official and unofficial persons? It all depends on your point of view on the subject. It’s all fluctuating and relative, Nikanor Ivanovich. Today I’m a unofficial person, and tomorrow, lo and behold, I’m an official one! And it happens the other way round -oh, how it does!” – Chapter 9.
The time had come to act, to drink the bitter cup of responsibility.
Yes, man is mortal, but that isn’t so bad. What’s bad is that sometimes he’s unexpectedly mortal, that’s the rub. And, in general, he can’t even say in the morning what he’ll be doing that very same night.
All the words he used in the beginning were gutter words. He heard them and stored them in his brain. Now, as I walk in the street, I look at dogs with secret horror. WHo knows what is hidden in their heads?
Ah, what stars there are in the Ukraine. I’ve been living in Moscow almost seven years, but I still feel drawn to my homeland. My heart aches, I get a terrible urge to board a train and be off. To see the cliffs covered in.
People who think you can use terror are quite wrong. No, no, terror is useless, whatever its colour – white, red or even brown! Terror completely paralyses the nervous system.
Ruin, therefore, is not caused by lavatories but it’s something that starts in people’s heads. So when these clowns start shouting “Stop the ruin!” – I laugh!′ ‘I swear to you, I find it laughable! Every one of them needs to hit himself on the back of the head and then when he has knocked all the hallucinations out of himself and gets on with sweeping out backyards – which is his real job – all this “ruin” will automatically disappear.
Bulgakov always loved clowning and agreed with E. T. A. Hoffmann that irony and buffoonery are expressions of ’the deepest contemplation of life in all its conditionality.