The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.
Nature: a place where birds fly around uncooked.
There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion.
A person who, because he has corns himself, always treads on other people’s toes.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them...
Talk to a woman as if you loved her, and to a man as if he bored you.
Bad manners make a journalist.
It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it.
Marriage is a long, dull meal with dessert served at the beginning.
To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.
It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.
We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim – objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.
As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection.
Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.
It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man’s deeper nature is soon found out.
Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.
I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don’t talk politics.
Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualification.
Reforms in Russia are very tragic, but they always end in a farce.