Without solitude true happiness was impossible. The fallen angel was faithless to God probably only because he longed for solitude, which angles knew not.
This thirst for personal success, and this continual concentration of the mind in one direction, makes people cold, and.
What's the point? To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for a narrow-minded or embittered man.
If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose would be: Nothing passes away. I believe that nothing passes away without leaving a trace, and that every step we take, however small, has significance for our present and our future existence.
What we have, we do not treasure, and what's more we do not even love it.
Three o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy.
Indeed, I always feel when I meet people that I am lower than all, and that they all take me for a buffoon. So I say, ‘Let me really play the buffoon. I am not afraid of your opinion, for you are every one of you worse than I am.' That is why I am a buffoon.
Only one who loves can remember so well.
Let's drop the philosophy!
In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit, performed miracles, slain, burned towns, preached new religions, conquered whole kingdoms.
Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.
She could not speak; she was crying. She turned away from him, and pressed her handkerchief to her eyes. "Let her have her cry out. I'll sit down and wait," he thought, and he sat down in an arm-chair. Then he rang and asked for tea to be brought him, and while he drank his tea she remained standing at the window with her back to him.
Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life.
Who loved without any genuine feeling, with superfluous phrases, affectedly, hysterically, with an expression that suggested that it was not love nor passion, but something more significant; ...
When someone spends the fewest number of motions on a given action, that is grace.
To live simply to die is by no means amusing, but to live with the knowledge that you will die before your time, that's really is idiotic.
Others made me a slave, but I must squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.
Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.
We can't always know the whys and wherefores,' the old man said. 'A bird's given two wings, not four, because it can fly with two; so a man's not given to know everything, but only a half or a quarter. As much as he needs to know in order to live, so much he knows.
And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a moment to catch his breath. The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain: he touched one end, and the other moved.
Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling. There are in store for you many unsuccessful days and whole unsuccessful seasons: there will be great misunderstandings and deep disappointments… you must be prepared for all this, expect it and nevertheless, stubbornly, fanatically follow your own way.
Lonely people read a great deal, but say little and hear little.
God alone knows what a man's real calling is.
I'm quite sure there wasn't anything at all funny. You oughtn't to go and see plays, you ought to go and look at yourself. What a grey life you lead, what a lot you talk unnecessarily.
Money, like vodka, turns a person into an eccentric.
When the geese have cackled they will be still again. First they cackle and then they stop.
A time has come of sorrow and sadness for you. Man, my dear friend, is like a samovar. It doesn't always stand on a shelf in the chill but sometimes they put hot coals in it and it goes psh... psh! This comparison is worthless but you won't think up a cleverer one.
An agonising, strange, soul-revolting silence lasted for three minutes. Oh, those three minutes!
Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system. Raskolnikov.
The phlegamtic female is a weepy, bug-eyed, fat, lumpy, fleshy German. She looks like a sack of flour. She is born in order to become a mother-in-law. That is her whole ambition.
A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.
And how awful it is not to have any opinions!
His face looked angry, ill-humoured, and preoccupied, like that of a man in pain forced to listen to nonsense.
There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live ... we must work, just work!
Happiness does not exist, nor should it, and if there is any meaning or purpose in life, they are not in our peddling little happiness, but in something reasonable and grand. Do good!
The past,' he thought, 'is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.' And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.
I look upon you as so many pawns, as inanimate pawns.
You must trust and believe in people, or life becomes impossible.
A fool is as a fool does.
Except for two or three older writers, all modern literature seems to me not literature but some sort of handicraft, which exists only so as to be encouraged, though one is reluctant to use its products.
Every science has a beginning but no end.
In the first place, the ideas of people who are not intellectually free are always in a muddle, and it's extremely difficult to talk to them; and, secondly, they usually love no one, and have nothing to do with women, and their mysticism has an unpleasant effect on sensitive people.
Why, if ever again... you dare to mention a single word... about my mother... I shall send you flying downstairs!" "What's.
We can't make her see anything, Pyotr Alexandritch! We are simply done. We talk of one thing and she talks of something else.
You can always get money from her. She is as rich as a Jew.
If you don't insist on having asparagus in January, you keep your money in your purse.
You ask me what life is? It is like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and nothing more is known.
But we all have to die, you know. Death is not a potato.
The conceited, benevolent tone of the prefaces, the abundance of translator's notes, which disturb my concentration, the parenthetical question marks and sic's that the translator generously scatters through the article or book, are for me like an encroachment both upon the person of the author and upon my independence as a reader.
