Dogma, static positions, consonance – all these are obstacles to catching the disease of art, at least in its more complex forms.
Name me the final number, the highest, the greatest. But that’s absurd! If the number of numbers is infinite, how can there be a final number? Then how can you speak of a final revolution? There is no final one. Revolutions are infinite.
The next stage of development, perhaps in the distant future, will be a social order under which there will be no need for the coercive power of the state.
The ancient God created the old man, capable of erring – thus he erred himself.
At night numbers must sleep; it is their duty, just as it is their duty to work in the daytime. Not sleeping at night is a criminal offense.
By complex ways, by looking deep into the dark well of the human soul, full of filth, somewhere at the very bottom of it Chekhov at last found his faith. And this faith turned out to be faith in man, in the power of human progress. And man became his god.
It has never occurred to me before, but this is truly how it is: all of us on earth walk constantly over a seething, scarlet sea of flame, hidden below, in the belly of the earth. We never think of it. But what if the thin crust under our feet should turn into glass and we should suddenly see?
It is not possible to build on negative emotions. Genuine literature will come only when we replace hatred for man with love for man.
There is no joy nobler than suffering for the sake of love for man.
To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.
It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this “once in a thousand years” has come today.
What is it to you if I don’t want others to want for me, if I want to want myself – if I want the impossible...
If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.
Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.
The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity – but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.
The whole world is one immense woman, and we are in her very womb, we are not yet born, we are joyfully ripening.
We comes from God, I from the Devil.
The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.
And a question stirred within me: What if he, this yellow-eyed creature, in his disorderly, filthy mound of leaves, in his uncomputed life, is happier than we are?
Don’t forget that we lawyers, we’re a higher breed of intellect, and so it’s our privilege to lie. It’s as clear as day. Animals can’t even imagine lying: if you were to find yourself among some wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture.