I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn’t it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?
And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential – I know it.
Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise – because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man who has a well-furnished European apartment, with an excellent toilet, and a well-furnished dogma.
Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.
Truth is the first thing that present-day literature lacks. The writer has drowned himself in lies, he is too accustomed to speak prudently, with a careful look over his shoulder.
The highly complex, almost mathematical, nature of music creates for it an ironclad protection against the microbes of dilletantism, which penetrate much more easily into the fields of painting, literature, and the theater.
When we remove the snowdrift piled up over Chekhov in recent years, we uncover a man profoundly agitated by social problems; a writer whose social ideals are the same as those we live by; a philosophy of the divinity of man, of fervent faith in man – the faith that moves mountains.
The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods – romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being.
Individual consciousness is just sickness.
Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
The world is kept alive only by heretics.
The inner world: those spiritual apartments to which we are reluctant to admit strangers.
Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.
Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.
There is an excellent way to make predictions without the slightest risk of error: predict the past.
And tomorrow – who knows what happens? Do you get it? I don’t know and no one knows – it’s all unknown! You understand, that this is the end to the Known? This is the new, the improbable, the unpredictable.
We appeal, not to those who reject today in the name of a return to yesterday, not to those who are hopelessly deafened by today; we appeal to those who see the distant tomorrow – and judge today in the name of tomorrow.
We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses; we are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses; tomorrow will bring the liberation of the individual – in the name of man.
Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken – errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs.
The literature of the immediate future will inevitably turn away from painting, whether respectably realistic or modern, and from daily life, whether old or the very latest and revolutionary, and turn to artistically realized philosophy.